


Life's A Beach

by JyaGhost



Category: Stargate Atlantis, Stargate SG-1, Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Fusion, F/M, M/M, Wincest - Freeform, caveat lector
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-25
Updated: 2017-03-25
Packaged: 2018-10-10 12:58:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 44,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10438242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JyaGhost/pseuds/JyaGhost
Summary: When Sam gets his letter to Stanford, Dean sides with him. The boys'  first hurdle to overcome is when the Impala breaks down in Long Beach California, stranding them. The timely arrival of one Evan Lorne helps to get them ready for a new life.Dean tries out for the LA County lifeguards but before he can leave the beach, medevac helicopter pilot John Sheppard recruits him into training to become an EMT.For the next couple of years, they settle down to live ordinary lives.If you don't count the demon Dean exorcised in front of a baker's dozen cops and witnesses one hot summer night.But as 2004 roars to a close, strange and terrible things begin to happen, threatening everything Sam and Dean have built for themselves.Confessing all, the boys are surprised as John, Evan and a small group of loyal friends stand beside them, ready to fight. Reunited with their father and Bobby, Dean and Sam are gonna need all the help they can get.You see, the creature that started it all by killing Mary Winchester is coming for Sam.And Hell's coming with him.





	1. Had Enough of Crime

**Author's Note:**

> _Dedication: To my usual betas, KestrelFliesAlone and LightningStrike, who totally flaked out on this. To Camshaft, for coming to my rescue with those idiots, and to Elena, who fine tuned the warnings section so it didn’t look like a phone book._

(2001)

Dean was twenty-two the night he took his seventeen year old brother out of their father’s care for good.

Sam had earned himself a full ride to Stanford. Not too bad for a kid who never had the same address for more than six months.

But John Winchester wasn’t proud of his youngest son’s accomplishment. Or if he was, he was too angry at the loss of a soldier to show it.

Dean watched them fight and made his choice. Their father preached about the mission, about leaving the family…but he’d never really been part of it. Dean had raised Sam from the moment their mother died; in cold motel rooms with only cereal and peanut butter to eat. In the doublewide trailer where the roof leaked and mold grew on the floorboards and in the carpets.

The letter from Stanford changed everything. Sam had found a way out, and there was no way Dean could let him go alone.

Their mother’s Chevy Impala had belonged to Dean since his seventeenth birthday, and as their father and Sam continued yelling at each other, he quietly loaded his and his brother‘s gear inside. They’d only arrived in town a few hours ago and hadn’t so much as taken a sock out of their duffle bags before going to that final, miserable dinner together.

Sam had noticed Dean carrying everything back out of their room and knew what it meant. As their father ranted, he simply turned around, walked out the door and down the motel steps towards the car Dean was now emptying of most of their weapons. They wouldn’t need the arsenal where they were going.

Both Winchester boys told themselves it didn’t matter when their father disowned them before they’d left the parking lot.

~~

Like something out of a bad movie, the Impala breaks down while they’re driving out of Orange County California. They limp her into Long Beach, but their luck runs out again. It’s a simple, stupid repair, but it requires an engine hoist and they just don’t fucking have access to one.

With their credit cards about to bottom out, and only enough money for another night in the motel and some food, Dean leaves Sam watching TV and heads out to hustle. He’d prefer to stick to pool, but if he has to, he’ll sell himself to get the money they need.

Wouldn’t be the first time.

~~

Unlike some of the other places, the club Dean finds himself in that night isn’t half bad. He heard rumors on the street you could find whatever you wanted here, but just from looking? He’d never believe it.

Takes half a glass of Coke before he’s cruised. Unfortunately, the dude’s looking to sell instead of buy and Dean tactfully turns him down. It’s not a good idea to antagonize the locals when you can’t make a fast escape.

He sees the bar through the bottom of his glass when a man, who introduces himself as Lorne, slides onto the stool next to him.

They talk casually, feeling each other out. Lorne’s good-looking and Dean’s pretty sure he’s going to enjoy earning some cash with the guy.

Then Sam appears and heads for Dean like a missile. Their father’s truck just circled the parking lot of the Super 8 they were staying in.

Lorne’s eyes flick back and forth over the pair of them, and before they know what’s happened, he’s got them in his car, sneaking them back to the Super 8.

Accustomed to making fast exits, neither of the Winchesters unpacked their stuff with the exception of some dirty clothes Sam was going to take to the laundry. It’s shoved back into the bags in seconds; the room searched for anything that might’ve fallen out unnoticed.

An inch or so shorter, with the same type of haircut and same taste in clothes, Lorne looks enough like Dean to fool a sleepy clerk when he goes to check them out. Four minutes after they arrive, the Winchester boys make their escape undetected. Their father’s truck, with its distinctive height and additions, sat in the shadows of the parking lot, but there’d been no sign of John Winchester.

~~

Lorne…Evan… lays down some basic rules with his offer to let them stay with him, but doesn’t ask too many questions. For reasons they themselves don’t understand, they return the favor.

Once Sam’s drifted into an uneasy sleep in the guest room, Dean goes to pay their sugar daddy.

Only to learn that easy access isn’t the reason Evan took them in.

In the bar, he was a stalking horse for the owner, checking to make sure the new face wasn’t underage or a cop. A well timed phone call would have gotten him out of any plans he and Dean had made once he’d figured Dean out.

Evan brought them home with him to take sins off his Karma, and that’s all.

The line should sound ridiculous, but in the quiet darkness of the bedroom, Dean doesn’t laugh. His gut is radiating feelings of safe for reasons it’s not sharing with his brain, and just for tonight, he’s not going to poke at it.

Instead, he goes back to his brother and curls around Sam’s warmth, letting himself sleep.

~~

The next morning, Evan passes over an ancient laptop and a printer, along with the classified section of the local newspaper. He also writes down his name, phone number and address on a piece of paper so Dean can memorize it for the references part of any applications he fills out.

While Dean goes through the want ads - befuddled, bemused and hardly able to believe he’s actually doing this - Sam is enlisted to help move the couch so the area rug underneath it can be cleaned.

The house has an open floor plan, so Dean’s able to keep watch on them. His brain isn’t content to listen to the vague rumblings of instinct anymore, and Dean knows that if he were the one given the choice between himself and Sam, he’d chase Sam around with his tongue and dick hanging out in less than a heartbeat.

Evan, however, seems immune to Sam’s physical charms as they tear the living room apart, listening to some weird ass music on the stereo while they work. Silently prompted by Dean, who can’t leave things alone, Sam mumbles a couple of times about the temperature in the room before he takes his shirt off and tosses it aside.

Evan’s response isn’t the staring they were half dreading, but a set of absent directions to a small box fan in the pantry.

They set the fan up, and after ten minutes and another silent conversation that’s disguised as Sam getting a cold drink of water, Sam puts his shirt back on and they stop testing their new roommate.

~~

Dean calls on Monday morning and has Sam’s school records faxed up from Texas. They’re not much, considering their father yanked him out right after New Year’s, but thanks to the good folks at the Post Offices across the country, Sam’s up to date on the ‘home school’ assignments that Texas law mandates he do.

Sam wants to keep doing those, but Dean digs in his heels and gets Evan to find out what high school his district falls under.

Paperwork in hand, the three of them head down to Sojourner Truth Senior High School, and Dean spins a tale for the principal that deserves a Pulitzer while Sam and Evan take the fifty cent tour of the facility.

Due to his grades and his early admittance into Stanford, Sam’s given a schedule full of A.P classes and the principal’s enthusiastic welcome to the school when he starts the next morning.

~~

In the Lorne-Winchester household - and that phrase is still weird even after a couple of weeks of thinking it - there are only a handful of rules.

Rule One is no drugs for either of them, no booze for Sam, and anything that Dean drinks better be in moderation.

Rule Two is no tricking, also known as hustling, anywhere at anytime. Dean assures Evan that Sam never did, but Evan simply gives him a long look and repeats himself.

Rule Three is find a legitimate, tax paying job.

For Sam’s sake, Dean pounds the pavement instead of doing things The Winchester Way. He gets nothing, and when Sam tries each day after school, he strikes out too. For Sam it’s not so bad - he’s not eighteen yet. But Dean’s old enough to have worked before, or have some college or trade school under his belt to explain his lack of rè sumè . When he applies to places and they notice all the blank spaces left on his application, he can feel them marking him as a slacker without ever giving him a chance to defend himself.

It takes more willpower than is pretty to stick with the straight and narrow path of adulthood.

Especially when the owner of the garage calls Dean and threatens to sell the Impala if he’s not paid. He agreed to wait a week for his money, not two and a half.

They never sent out any applications for phony cards to replace the ones that hit their limit, so now they‘ve got nothing to fall back on.

Turning tricks would get the money, but not in time. Unless he did something stupid, and there’s no guarantee that anyone would be in the mood for stupid this time of day.

There’s nothing in either his duffle or Sam’s that could be pawned off for the kind of cash he needs, not even combining the few guns they’ve got left with Dean‘s entire toolkit.

And stealing from Evan is a line Dean isn’t willing to cross for a car. For Sam, yes. But not for the Impala. Which can be replaced. Someday. Eventually. It wouldn’t be their mother’s legacy, wouldn’t be Dean’s baby, but it would be transportation…

He doesn’t realize he’s trembling until he feels the light touch of Evan’s hand on his shoulder and his cell phone is gently taken away from him.

The number for the garage comes up easily, and Evan asks if the call was about their car. Dean finds himself nodding miserably.

The amount of the bill raises Evan’s eyebrow a little, but he jerks his head and tells Dean to grab his jacket and keys - he’ll lend Dean the money he needs.

Following Evan’s Toyota back home, with the Impala purring happily under his hands and Metallica in the tape deck, Dean’s eyes start watering and refuse to stop for a while.

~~

Dean waits until Sam’s asleep before going to Evan’s room. He hasn’t offered since that first night, but he doesn’t have anything else to give the man for everything he’s done. Saving people is one thing. Saving a car is something else.

In Dean’s mind, sleeping with Evan now wouldn’t really be breaking Rule Two, it would just be…bending it a little.

He doesn’t get more than a toe in the door before Evan gently tells him to go back to bed.

The air is thick with things that go unspoken. Dean nods in acceptance of Evan’s choice and leaves.

He never goes to Evan’s room after that.

~~

One Saturday morning, the woman next door gives Sam ten bucks to mow her lawn, and another ten to haul tables and boxes out afterwards so she can have a yard sale.

Franny asks a lot of questions; about Evan, about Dean and about Sam himself. He knows she’s afraid of Evan, and figures out from her conversation that Dean’s been stonewalling her, which makes Sam her best bet for information about the new faces in the neighborhood.

Unfortunately for her, he’s been a champion liar since he was five and doesn’t give her a scrap.

Still, nosy neighbors and Dean’s insistence on Sam going to a ‘real’ school aside, Sam loved it here.

Sure, the lack of their own money bugged him, but there was no watching Dean’s eyes get tight when he eyed up bars and decided whether pool, poker or sex would get them another couple of days’ survival while they waited for another round of phony credit cards to come through the mail. Living with Evan is like having a normal parent and Sam considers it paradise.

Instead of weapons practice, endless scouring through rotting newspapers and microfilm, or waiting for Dad to show up and wondering how busted up the old man would be this time, there’s normal, ordinary teenager’s chores.

Sam’s are school, sweeping the hardwood floors up every day and washing windows once a week. He also dusts everything once a week without being asked. Dean laughs his ass off and calls him a girl, but since it doesn’t bother Evan, Sam keeps it up.

It also doesn’t bother Evan to have Sam peering over his shoulder while he cooks, as long as Sam makes himself useful. Peeling, slicing and dicing whatever is needed become Sam’s way of contributing to the dinnertime process since he’s - understandably - much better with knives than Evan is.

Dean’s chores are setting and clearing the table, plus doing the dishes, which isn’t all that strange, but watching him do the laundry in a machine that doesn’t have a window on the door is really surreal. Even when they rented a place somewhere with their father, they’d always had to use Laundromats.

Scrubbing down the bathroom and kitchen are team efforts. So is the yard work - which is how Franny knew Sam could handle a lawn mower - and the garbage is taken out by whoever is the first to wake up in the morning.

It’s a nice, routine life, and Sam snuggles into bed every night with a contented smile on his lips.

~~

Dean takes the lifeguard swim test on an impulse. He’s been turned down for nearly everything else in this stupid city, he might as well make it a clean sweep. If he gets lucky, maybe he’ll drown.

The women and men who work the beach full time, not just over the summer, swim with them. Anyone who can keep up gets a job. Anyone who can’t goes back to daydreaming on the sand. Pretty simple rules, but effective.

There are thirty slots still open, up and down LA County. Dean comes in in thirty second place and is too damn depressed to swear.

He’s wiping saltwater off his face with one of the rags he keeps in the Impala when someone walks up to him.

John Sheppard offers Dean a different job.

He doesn’t pull any punches. It’s messy, thankless and vaguely dangerous. It’s hard work, long hours and barely adequate pay.

It’s also absolutely necessary and potentially life-changing.

Dean explains that he won’t be around after the summer, that he - Sam doesn’t enter the conversation - is heading for Stanford in the fall.

Sheppard shrugs and tells him San Jose needs Emergency Medical Technicians just as much as Long Beach does. Get trained on Long Beach’s dime; get transferred in time for classes.

It might be Sam’s birthday, but Dean gets the best present.

~~

Feeling smug, Dean goes back to Evan’s house to tell everyone about his new job. Sam’s at the library, and Dean’s got his head in the refrigerator when Evan comes in, telling him dinner will be ready soon.

 

Dean’s news receives a congratulations and the assurance that if he needs help with something, all he has to do is ask.

Evan’s support and patience are things Dean still can’t wrap his mind around, so he doesn’t try. What he does is go clean up so they can eat.

~~

Sam slides in the door two minutes after Dean gets out of the shower. He’s mopey and miserable for various reasons, but perks up when he hears that Dean scored a job.

Everything’s fine until Sam gets up for more iced tea.

There’s a small, choked off noise. Almost simultaneously, they ask Sam what’s wrong. He doesn’t hear them, staring at the refrigerator shelf.

Evan starts to get up, but Dean beats him to Sam’s side. His little brother is staring at the…really nice…cake sitting on the top shelf behind the tea pitcher.

It’s got eighteen small candles and Sam instead of Sammy on it. Pretty clear who bought it.

While the birthday boy has a chick-flick moment, Dean meets Evan’s puzzled and concerned gaze. He points to the cake and gives a small shrug. Evan goes blank before, just for a single instant, looking distantly furious.

It’s a couple of years before Dean finds out that, in that eye blink of a moment, Evan would’ve cheerfully driven a knife through their father’s heart if he’d been standing there.

~~

Sam finishes what little dinner is still on his plate, but begs off dessert to disappear into the bedroom. They let him go; Dean knowing he’s still being girly, Evan not knowing whether he screwed something up or what.

They clean up the kitchen in silence, Evan finding Dean’s version of a birthday cake when he puts away the leftovers.

Dean can’t help feeling defensive when Evan moves it up to the top shelf near the whole one. Unless he broke Rule Two, he didn’t have the money to buy anything else. Besides, a single chunk of cake out of the grocery store’s discount section is a Winchester family…well, a Winchester brothers’ tradition.

The quiet assurance that Sam will always like whatever Dean gets him more than what anyone else buys doesn’t make Dean feel any better, but he gives Evan points for trying.

~~

They’re watching some funny animal show Dean’s gotten himself addicted to when a friend of Evan’s calls and begs for a ride home because his car is broken down.

Waving off Dean’s offer to come with and see if he can fix it, Evan suggests talking to Sam instead. There’s ice cream in the freezer to go with the cake if that’ll help. Then he leaves to rescue his friend, and Dean goes back to the bedroom to see if he can restore the good mood that was in the house before dinner.

Traditionally, Dean would explain something new to Sam that he was now old enough to help with, like loading up shotgun shells when he was seven, or the demonstration of the explosive applications of cleaning product chemistry from twelve months ago.

This year, Dean talks about the swim test, and the crazy haired lifeguard who convinced him to sign up for E.M.T training. Of going the next morning to pick up his books and uniforms and go through orientation. Of the brutal pace he’ll be expected to maintain in order to be ready to hit the streets on Memorial Day and start saving peoples’ lives with medicine instead of rock salt.

As always, Sam listens, snuggled in Dean’s arms while he nibbles on his cake. When Dean runs out of words, Sam sets the empty container aside and kisses Dean, long and deep.

They make love until they hear Evan come home, and after a quick clean up, Sam goes out to talk to their friend.

It’s five minutes after midnight when Sam has his very first Unbirthday, courtesy of some well placed chocolate sauce, and a tradition is born.

Since Sam doesn’t get the reference, Dean only distantly remembers where it’s from, and Evan inherited the movie from his mother, the three of them munch on Unbirthday cake and ice cream while watching Disney’s Alice in Wonderland.

Normal life is weird, but it ain’t half bad.

~~

Sam, listening outside the window of Dean’s orientation class, is intimidated by the sheer volume of stuff Dean’s got to learn in the next three weeks. Just to give people what’s considered the basics in emergency medical care.

But Dean’s gotten a look at the first couple of chapters of his manuals and he‘s suddenly confident that He Can Do This. It’s shit their father taught him years ago, that John Winchester learned as a Marine in Vietnam. It’s not going to be easy, but there’s nothing Dean likes better than a challenge.

Starting on Monday, he spends twelve hours a day in training. When he gets home at night, he does his assignments and explains everything he learned to an attentive and eager Sam.

Evan is perfectly willing to give up television and play victim - reciting pains, making strange hacking noises, or simply rolling his eyes and moaning theatrically while Dean tries to figure out what medical condition he’s faking.

The first of the ‘family’s’ in-jokes is born the evening Dean successfully delivers Evan’s one pound, four ounce, bouncing baby throw pillow.

~~

Two weeks into classes, Dean gets his first paycheck. It’s just enough to pay Evan back for the Impala, which is a load off Dean’s mind.

The end of the following week is graduation.

Having the last name Winchester might alphabetically make him the last person to get his certification, but if they had the title here, he’d be valedictorian.

Sam’s in the audience with a mile wide grin on his face. They’d convinced Evan to come with them, and his smile is just as big.

As Dean walks onto the stage to accept his certification, he sees Sheppard in the back of the room. John gives him a smirk and a nod, and Dean sees the satisfaction his eyes.

It almost makes up for the fact his father isn’t - and never would be - there.

~~

The next morning, Dean starts working as an E.M.T out of Engine 77, the biggest, most complex firehouse in the city. In addition to running two ambulances out of their bays instead of the usual one, they also connected to the docks where their fireboat and three of the lifeguard’s Scarabs berthed.

Because of the Scarabs, ‘surf bunnies’ ran tame through the place, laughing and joking with the ‘smoke eaters’ and ‘trauma monkeys’ on a regular basis. It was the reason John pulled what strings he could to get Dean assigned there - he has friends that would keep an eye on Dean and help him out when John’s not around.

Friends like Cameron Mitchell, a Kansas born lifeguard who has his ninety three year old grandmother living with him and an impressive collection of classic car magazines that he is more than happy to share.

There’s Fire Investigator Laura “Bottle Rocket” Beckett, who’s a pain in the ass, but she knows how to blow stuff up, so Dean likes her anyway.

He likes Jennifer Keller too, the woman he’ll be riding with. She’s actually Dean’s age, but she’s been a paramedic for three years already and that makes her the boss.

The same way Dean knew it would be safe to flirt and bullshit with Laura - who’s happily married to a doctor - he knows Jenn’s got a sign up in mile high blinking neon that says “Back off and Stay Away.” Unless it’s got something to do with the job, Dean does.

There’s no way in hell he’s going to screw his life up now.

~~

Dean survives his first shift, ending it with a quick swim alongside some of the lifeguards on Sunday morning. He was offered a surfing lesson, but Cam and John both say the waves suck once they see them. They’ll try again Tuesday if Dean’s second go-around, Memorial Day, hasn’t killed him.

~~

Lifeguard towers 20 through 25 see way too much of Dean on Monday. He’s barely gotten half a cup of coffee in him before the call comes through for an unconscious surfer at Tower 23. Dude wiped out and got whacked on the head by his boogie board, Cam tells him, as Jenn rolls her eyes and they take the guy to the hospital.

Breakfast is interrupted by a car wreck; one of the drivers is complaining of neck pain. Dean has her pegged as a fake just from the way she acts as soon as she sees them, but he does what he’s been taught anyway.

Ronon Dex at Tower 21 calls for assistance when a woman brings her son up. Something in the sand sliced the poor little guy’s foot to ribbons.

While they work on him, Ronon gets the mother to take him down to their blankets. He comes back in a fury, grabs a shovel and a trashcan from inside the Tower and disappears as John pulls up in the rescue truck.

Dean’s busy with the child, but he catches the knowing wink and nod Jenn gives John and it makes him feel warm inside.

Broken bottles, Ronon informs them as he and the mother return a minute later. They were half buried at the waterline.

Dean bites his tongue all the way to the hospital, thinking about how much tetanus shots hurt, and what he’d like to do to the idiot who brought glass onto a beach.

They get back to the station, cleaning out and restocking the ambulance for the fifth time before sitting down to a late lunch. So when the call from Tower 24 comes in before Dean’s gotten a chance to take a single bite out of his sandwich, he’s almost ready to cry.

The guy is hacking water out of his lungs when they pull up and refuses medical treatment. Keller gets up in his face about parking lot drowning, but he still won’t listen, so Dean grabs a clipboard from between the seats and holds it out with a pen. Drowned Rat can sign the fifteen pages of paperwork that releases LA County and the City of Long Beach from responsibility in his death, or he can get his ass into the ambulance and go to the hospital.

Unsurprisingly, Drowned Rat picks the hospital over the paperwork. Once he’s safely in the care of the ER doctor, Jenn gets to release the laughter Dean knows she’s been holding since they strapped the dude onto the stretcher.

Drowned Rat only needed to sign one copy, not fifteen.

~~

The waves are looking good Tuesday, and Dean gets to paddle a surfboard around in them for a bit before Cam’s got to go on duty. Ronon offers to stay out with Dean a little longer, but he’s a temptation Dean doesn’t want to deal with.

As tall as Sam, with broader shoulders and a tight six pack of abs, Ronon moves like a hunter, and it turns Dean on like nobody’s business. He feels guilty and ashamed about it, which makes him mad because there’s no reason to be either one, but that’s life as a Winchester for you.

~~

Even though they made him insane, Sam sat through classes every day to graduate from an actual high school because that‘s what Dean wanted him to do.

Their father had been injured on a hunt and forced to stay in one place. Thanks to this, Sam had gone to an actual school for part of his freshman and sophomore years. When Dean got hurt last year, they settled in Texas for a piece of November and all of December. The entire time Sam was on the road afterwards, he’d dreamed about the friends he left behind and wanted to go back to them.

Now, he was wistfully dreaming of the day he’d climb into the Impala and leave Sojourner Truth Senior High in the dust. Hopefully Stanford’s student population wouldn’t be so damn predictable.

When he was the new kid off the bus, he was a nobody. When Dean started E.M.T training, and Sam could use the Impala to get back and forth, it took two days before everyone’s curiosity made Sam sick to his stomach.

The pristinely kept ‘67 Chevy was officially the coolest ride in school. Sam managed to avoid people seeing him get out of it by being on campus earlier than anyone else - a product of Dean having to be at the Academy by seven while Sam went to class at eight - but getting into it at the end of the day was a problem. Knowing who drove the classic car was a hot topic, and getting a ride in her the goal of every status seeker in school.

Thanking God, for only the second time in his life, that Dean didn’t like talking about emotions, Sam went back to taking the bus.

A nobody once more, and glad of it, Sam could admit to himself that he had zero interest in the prom and less than zero interest in the Senior trip to Catalina, so he didn’t need to find a date for the first, or a clique for the second. He just had to get through the tunnel to the graduating light at the end.

Which meant the final tedium of donning a stupid red gown plus a cardboard hat in mid-June, and marching across a stage to take a piece of paper out of some guy’s hand.

It’s not until the third of the ceremony’s endless speeches that he gets it.

Dean never got to go to a real high school. He had to settle for the same ‘mail order’ G.E.D. that Sam was heading for. He never got the chance to go to prom, or be in a yearbook or wear a class ring either, but it’s too late for Sam to do that now.

He can and does resolve to stop bitching about the ‘dress’ though, and let Dean have whatever photos Dean wants.

Sam looks over his shoulder, easily finding his older brother sitting in the audience with the other students’ families and remembers the feeling in his chest when he watched Dean shaking hands with the Fire Chief the night he’d finished E.M.T training.

Dean catches him looking, and across the room, Sam can see his eyebrows rise. ‘Figured it out huhn?’ his face says. Sam can’t help the goofy grin that spreads over his lips: ‘You got me, big brother, I am Enlightened.’

Dean’s smile is smug enough that Sam clearly mouths ‘Jerk’ at him. Dean shoots back the predictable ‘Bitch,’ then makes the hand sign for ‘Turn around.’

Sam does, and realizes he’s getting The Death Glare from the self-important talking head on the stage, who resents that Sam is ignoring whatever ‘valuable life lesson’ he’s imparting.

Sam can’t make himself look repentant, but he does settle back in his chair and resign himself to renewing his boredom quota.

~~

Dean brought a disposable camera with him, but Evan ignored the boys’ protests for this go-around and carried in his professional gear. He spent enough time working with Photoshop and a couple other programs to save the mangled pictures Sam took of Dean’s ceremony that he’d rather just go from scratch. Besides, he can always add a few not-Sam shots to his portfolio.

He wishes he could get photos of Dean’s face without the guy noticing, especially when Winchester, Samuel is read out and Sam makes his way to the stage.

Dean wouldn’t appreciate his little brother knowing that he had tears in his eyes though.

~~

Sam throws his cap into the air with his fellow graduates, but unlike them, he catches it instead of letting it hit the ground so it’s still nice and clean when he sticks it on Dean’s head a few minutes later.

He tells Dean that the scarlet color of the cap compliments the cherry lettering of the patch on his uniform so nicely that Dean should keep it.

Before Dean gets the cap off, Evan snaps a photo of him. Dean howls in mock outrage and goes to chase Evan around the car, finally managing to settle the cap on Evan’s head. Sam, who picked the disposable camera out of Dean’s pocket, gets the picture of their laughing friend.

The Impala even gets to show off the prized mortarboard on her roof, with Sam leaning against her side and her back door open behind him like two classmates sharing a hug.

The cap’s tassel is the first, last and only decoration Dean allows to dangle from his baby’s rear view mirror.

~~

Despite the graduation gown being ankle length and long sleeved, Sam still had to wear a suit underneath it for some stupid reason, and he’s not keeping it on while he’s partying.

Dean came to the school straight from work, so they head home to change clothes before figuring out where to go to blow off some serious steam.

No matter how much they pout at him, Evan refuses to join them in their exploration of the Los Angeles nightlife. He will, however, allow them to twist his arm off and go to dinner instead of making it.

~~

The Olive Garden might be a simple chain restaurant, but the Winchesters have never eaten there, and that makes it special to Sam. Chef Boyardee, spaghetti out of a box, and pizza were the only Italian foods he knew until they came to live with Evan, and he wants to try as many of them as he can. The Never Ending Pasta bowl sounds like the perfect way to do it - you mix and match whatever you want until you’re too full to eat another bite.

Once Dean hears that, he’s onboard with the plan, just like Sam knew he’d be.

~~

Dinner is everything Sam could want it to be.

Between Evan’s single plate and the two plates each that he and Dean had, Sam gets to sample five different kinds of sauce and pasta.

He also gets to watch his coffee addicted brother go cross-eyed at his very first bite of tiramisu.

The noises Dean makes while he’s eating his dessert have Sam and Evan asking “Need a room?” and “Should we leave you two alone?” almost simultaneously.

Overhearing them, their poor waitress gets another bad case of the giggles and has to wander off for a few minutes to compose herself before they get their check.

Once the bill is paid and they’re all out in the parking lot, Sam takes advantage of the occasion to do something he’s been wondering about.

Evan’s a little startled, but he returns Sam’s hug without a hint of hesitation. Sam snuggles for a minute before pulling away, his question answered.

The embrace was warm, strong and affectionate, just like Sam would’ve gotten from ‘Uncle’ Bobby. Nowhere near the level of Dean’s, but light years away from the mechanical, duteous hugs Sam had rarely gotten from his father.

He thought about sending the bastard copies of the photos from Dean’s ceremony and his own, along with a tasteful note asking what their mother might think if she could see her boys now.

Then he decided not to waste the postage and maybe just send something to Bobby, letting him know they were alive and well.

Bobby, unlike their father, would be proud of them.

~~

There’s still hours of daylight left when they make the thirty minute drive to the City of Los Angeles.

Sam figures that Dean will head for Planet Hollywood or the Hard Rock Café, and is completely surprised when his brother tosses a brochure for a tour of Bunker’s Hill into his lap.

It’s a couple of years old, but there’s museums and…a library…and gardens…on it. Sam immediately checks for possession, making Dean roll his eyes, but seriously, this is all stuff Sam will love and Dean will be bored to tears by.

Regaining the almost giddy mood he had during the Graduation Cap Chase back at school, Sam waits until Dean parks the car before rearranging himself along the front seat and happily giving Dean the first of that night‘s orgasms.

~~

One of the numerous job applications Sam put in finally comes through, and he starts work at a place called ‘Jonesin’ 4 Java’ the Thursday after graduation.

It’s right off the beach and Dean can sprint the distance from 77 in under three minutes using a couple of shortcuts John teaches him, so whenever Sam’s working, he checks in to make sure everything’s okay.

Laura goes with him one night, and since she loves all that fancy coffee stuff, she’s the one Dean blames for the place’s sudden popularity with the rest of the stationhouse.

She’s also the one he blames whenever he orders a chicken salad sandwich on a toasted cranberry bagel from Sam.

What little brother doesn’t know about Dean’s eating habits won’t hurt anyone.

~~

Most summer hires didn’t make much of an impression on Engine 77 and her crew.

Dean’s a different story. In one month and change, he’d proven himself by working his ass off and never thinking he was too good to get down and dirty.

If he didn’t have anything else to do, Dean drilled with the probationary firefighters running around the station. He watched them practice hooking lines up to hydrants until he could do it himself. He put on the heavy pants, coat, and boots that was the firefighter’s working gear, grabbed his medical bag - as heavy as a hose on it’s own - and ran up and down the station’s staircases until he could do ten laps without breaking much of a sweat.

The best of the probies could only do six before he sounded like he was gonna keel over and die.

Dean swam with the lifeguards before or after his shifts, learned all of their flag signals, and watched Daniel and Jonas handle the boats until he had a pretty good working knowledge of the vessels. He stuck his nose into the guts of the ambulances until he knew the sound of their engines and could tell when something was wrong just by the noises they were or weren’t making.

It wasn’t sucking up that made Dean do this stuff. “Sheppard’s Shadow” knew that he did not handle boredom well, so he made sure he never got that way.

If anyone asked if 77 had any problems with Dean, the unanimous answer would be that he learned too damn fast and had to move on to new subjects every few days.

If he read a procedure, you might slow him down some, since he didn’t always immediately understand what he read, but show him that same procedure in the field just one time, and he had it cold.

That kind of guy, the crew of 77 decided, deserved to be considered one of the gang.

~~

Sam’s gotten to know most of his brother’s coworkers by sight if not by name, and always exchanges a little conversation with them about the weather and whatnot.

So while it doesn’t exactly knock him on his ass with surprise the day Laura invites him to join everyone for a party after work, he does blink a few times.

Sam’s got the eleven a.m to seven p.m shift at Java, while Dean’s schedule is six a.m to six a.m or six p.m to six p.m. This week Dean’s on ‘nights’ so he’s out playing in the waves with Cameron when Sam walks down to the stationhouse.

He’s debating whether to wait for Dean in the Impala or outside of it when Dean’s boss, Lieutenant Jack O’Neill - large black coffee and three bear claws - yells for him to get his tuchis inside before he melts into the asphalt.

It’s not that hot out, but Sam takes the implied invitation and follows the older man into the recreation room.

A cold, unopened can of soda is pressed into his hand by Laura, and he’s directed to one of the oversized pillows that the youngest members of the Company use instead of chairs.

Dinner, which smells like barbeque to Sam, is apparently going to be eaten in front of the television. The lifeguards have commandeered it for the start of the Discovery Channel’s “Shark Week.”

The group from the beach arrives, Dean making sure Sam wants to stay at the party before he goes off to take a shower and change.

It’s only a few minutes later that the announcement “Chow’s on” is made, and everyone helps themselves to the food spread out on the tables.

Sam tries to take just a little bit, only to be whapped upside the head by Jack and frowned at by Laura. He’s so shocked he can’t be angry, and Dean didn’t see what happened, but Dean’s best friend did. John steps up, growling that Jack maybe should’ve explained things to Sam.

Jack stares at John, then turns to Laura and asks if she told Sam the rules. She assumed that Dean had.

Jack gives the ‘ass of you and me’ reply to that, roughly apologizes to Sam, and moseys off. Laura flushes guiltily and hurries to join her husband, leaving John holding the bag.

The sharing of food is a sacred act; guests are encouraged to stuff themselves and are expected to either take a turn cooking something at a later date, or find easy recipes for someone else to make. In Sam’s case, he can escape the food preparation by making sure the coffee urn never goes empty during a gathering.

Sam’s got questions, but he stifles them as Cameron calls out ‘thirty seconds to show time’ and Dean beckons from the pillow he’s saving for Sam. He does, however, add a little more food to his plate before he makes himself comfortable next to his brother.

By the end of the night, Sam’s positive there’s not a single person working out of Engine Company 77 that doesn’t have a screw loose somewhere, including Dean.

But he’s never had so much fun in his life.

~~

By the third week of August, everything is ready for the move to San Jose and Stanford.

Everything except Sam and Dean themselves.

Sam had finally found friends of his own. Yeah, they work with his brother, but he’s closer to them than Dean is. He’s scoured old bookstores with Daniel and enjoyed ethnic festivals of various kinds with Teyla. He’ll miss them.

He’ll also miss playing Monopoly with Laura and taking surfing lessons from Cameron.

More than that, leaving Evan is like tearing something out of his chest. Without him, they probably would’ve wound up going back to their father that final night at the motel. Evan gave them a life that’s normal, and safe, and Sam doesn’t want to lose touch with him like he‘ll lose it with everyone else.

One day, when Sam’s in a rotten mood over the move, Evan has a quiet talk with him while they’re fixing dinner.

Sam is his own person, and there’s no one telling him not to give out his phone numbers or email address, or even his snail-mail address if he wants to. It’s perfectly normal to have long distance friends, and unlike nearly every other student at Stanford, he’ll get to see his brother every day.

There’s holidays during the school year for visiting, and next summer he’s more than welcome to come back and stay until the fall semester starts up. Dean too, if his Lieutenant in San Jose is willing to do a personnel exchange.

It takes a good while, but Sam calms down and gets himself together, apologizing for the chick moment. Evan rolls his eyes at the phrasing, and gives Sam a bowl of potatoes to peel, saying he‘s glad Sam‘s gotten things off his chest.

Dinner’s…well done…but they eat it anyway.

~~

Firefighter Teyla Emmagen has a gift for finding bargains. She can wander through a flea market and come up with a like-new toaster oven, an electric skillet and a tea kettle for five bucks total. For twenty, she could probably find an entire living room set, but Sam and Dean’s apartment ‘up north’ is already furnished, so they don’t ask.

Sam does beg for help with curtains and bed linens, not to mention silverware and plates, and it’s no surprise to him when she leads the way to a department store that’s going out of business, scratching everything off the to-buy list for under eighty dollars.

Some of the sheets wouldn’t match, but they’d harmonize. Blue striped fitted sheet with a solid blue top sheet and white pillowcases for instance. Dean wouldn’t care, so Sam didn’t have any reason to complain.

Their plates, mugs and bowls were a rainbow of colors, but again, Dean wouldn’t care, so he didn’t either. Except for Evan, it wasn’t likely anyone would ever see their stuff anyway.

Teyla also unearthed a full set of glassware for them for three dollars from a garage sale. Wine glasses so big they could double as fishbowls; juice glasses that Sam thought could be used as bludgeons they were so heavy, and two delicate little champagne glasses that looked like they’d work better holding a rose bud instead of a beverage.

Daniel helped pack up, using the curtains, towels and whatnot as extra padding for the breakables. It was a clever trick Sam had never had a reason to learn and he absorbed it for when they came back in the summer.

Remembering what Evan said, Sam gave them both his email address and cell phone number.

Looking impish, Teyla called him right then and there to remind him to wash his linens by themselves the first time, or risk the dye going everywhere. Over her shoulder, showing off the reason he’d once been called Doctor Jackson, Daniel repeated everything she said in Latin.

Sam pulled them both into a hug and just couldn’t stop grinning.

~~

Dean had mixed feelings on the subject of San Jose. On one hand, it was rotten to be leaving some place that felt like home.

On the other hand, it was good to get going while the going was good.

John knew their whole story. Even the stuff Evan, after almost five months, still didn’t.

He’d caught them during one of those times when they weren’t acting like brothers. Dean would love to say it was all Sam’s fault, but he knew better.

Although John was on the beach the day Dean took the swim test, he’s considered a volunteer lifeguard. His ’full time’ job is as a pilot, flying the county’s Life Flight Alpha medevac helicopter.

Only the best of the best paramedics get to ride with him. Jenn tells Dean that guys have transferred out of Long Beach entirely because they couldn’t stand everyone knowing they weren’t good enough to make it onto Sheppard’s team.

She also tells him that John thought he had the balls to do it. Even if Dean couldn’t stay to work with Life Flight, San Jose’s MediStar One was just as elite. They could use a man with steady hands and sharp instincts, which Dean had proven he had.

There’s just one monkey wrench in the works; Dean’s terrified of flying.

John’s good about it when he finds out. He poked at Dean every once in a while, but usually left it alone.

On the final countdown for San Jose and Stanford, Dean decided to take the challenge.

The mayor wanted the police department’s Sky Eye in the air for some big street party neither Dean nor John cared about. One pilot was on vacation, another out sick and the remaining two were maxed out on overtime, so the mayor appealed to the Fire Department about borrowing one of the Life Flight guys.

John agreed to on the condition that Dean could sit shotgun. The paperwork was done and Dean went into the air for the first time.

 

He spent fifteen minutes of the hour and a half flight trying not to piss himself while John worked to chill him out.

By the time they landed to refuel, Dean was fairly steady, but he told John flat out he wouldn’t trust himself not to freeze with someone’s life on the line.

John flashed him an understanding half-smile, powered Sky Eye down so the maintenance guys could get at her fuel tanks, and gave Dean ten minutes to decide whether he wanted to go back up to try again.

Still dressed in a borrowed flight suit, Dean headed out to talk to his brother, who was waiting in the parking lot. That Sam hadn’t left for home was a tell on how freaked out Dean had been about getting into a flying eggbeater.

A little shaky, Dean didn’t notice the way Sam was looking at him. Didn’t twig on how close it was to the first time Sam had seen him in his ‘blues‘.

Sam liked men in uniform.

He really liked men in uniform.

When John came out to get Dean’s answer on going back, he had a clear view of Sam nuzzling at Dean’s throat while his hand stroked down the flight suit‘s zipper.

Instead of crossing the lot like he’d planned, John whistled to get Dean’s attention and jerked his thumb over his shoulder with a raised eyebrow.

He didn’t say anything when Dean joined him for the second trip, just waited until the mayor decided not to send them up a third time before pulling Dean into his office.

The questions were carefully phrased, full of confusion and concern. If Dean’s brain weren’t still a couple hundred feet in the air, he probably would’ve gotten pissed at his personal life being poked at.

Instead, in a voice that kept wanting to crack, Dean answered.

Sam was his younger brother, not his older one. Dean wasn’t being forced into anything - he loved Sam, Sam loved him. Things had just…gotten twisted…somewhere along the way.

Their father never laid a hand on either of them - he was never around *to* lay a hand on them.

John had seen which one was the aggressor when he caught them, and he shot Sam an unreadable look when Sam came looking for Dean.

The tone of the questions changed; John watching Sam the entire time he asked about their father and their life before he met them. With the youngest Winchester in the room, John never once touched on the brothers’ sexual behavior.

Dean had enough wits to be thankful of that. Sam could be violent when he was angry.

John turned them loose without saying too much, and three days later they were ready to leave the city altogether. The hitch in the plan was that Dean needed to talk to his boss about his references, and for that, he needed to go into the station.

~~

Cam’s grandmother piled her grandson and his friends with all manner of sweets and goodies on a regular basis, but she outdid herself for Dean’s party.

Mary Winchester had baked her son’s fourth birthday cake from scratch, and its taste was so close to this one that he’d need the ingredient list to tell the difference. That Sam could nibble on Grammie’s homemade chocolate icing and not remember their mother made something in Dean’s chest ache.

Then again, that might be Teyla‘s fault. Sam’s best friend tended to overspice everything she tried to cook, but her heart was in the right place, and Dean could usually choke down enough of whatever it was to make her happy.

He’d been told by Ronon he wouldn’t know what hell was until he ate John’s chili, but so far, his mentor hadn’t shared any with him.

Jack interrupted his train of thought by passing over a nicely padded envelope. John’s letter of recommendation was a given, and Dean had asked Jack for one, but he was surprised to find that his other friends had tossed in their own two cents about him.

Even more of a surprise was that two ER doctors saw fit to add their opinions to the mix. Carson Beckett might have done it because Laura asked him to, but Janet Frasier didn’t have such motivation.

As Dean shamelessly stroked his ego by reading what everyone had to say about him, John appeared out of nowhere and scared the hell out of him.

They hadn’t seen each other since that night in the hanger and Dean wasn’t sure what to expect. He knew better than to think his mentor would tell anyone about him and Sam, but…

To his relief, John didn’t keep him waiting long.

Dean already had all the official stuff he needed for San Jose. The unofficial stuff was a different story.

The first was the name and phone number of a guy who flew small planes. If Dean decided to try for MediStar after he finished his paramedic training, he could work on his fear of flying in the hands of a pilot John trusted.

The second was a silver caduceus necklace, a crimson eyed twin to the ones John and the rest of the Alpha crew wore. Once in place, the tip of the staff just touched the amulet Sam had given him on its shortened leather thong. Dean held both pendants in his fist for a minute, then John handed over the third thing.

There was a method to John’s madness, Dean realized, as he stared at the name, address and phone number of a San Jose psychologist.

Before Dean could say anything, John stepped closer and kept his voice low.

He had judged Dean on the beach, and yes, his perspective might be thrown a little of out whack with the full disclosure of life as a Winchester, but his first impression hadn’t changed. Dean was on his way to being a damn fine paramedic and that was that.

But Dean and Sam’s relationship wasn’t healthy, and that wasn’t just about the sex. Both of them had shown signs of childhood trauma way before the hanger, and it was clear to anyone who knew what to look for.

Even so, John wasn’t going to do anything that would force either brother into therapy if they didn’t want it. They were the ones who had to look themselves in the eyes every morning they shaved. If they kept it up forever, more power to them. But just in case the day came when one or both of them couldn’t anymore, there was a safety net already in place. It was the best compromise John could offer between acknowledging the subject and ignoring it.

Dean didn’t know what to say, just huddled in on himself. John tentatively laid a hand on his shoulder.

Dean could take a swing at him if he wanted to, just not to the face. Stomach, sure…hell, even a kick to the groin was fine but not the face. John had a date he needed to look pretty for.

It took a minute, but Dean’s brain processed the sentence and he gaped at John. His mentor flashed one of his trademark smirks and, with things heading back towards normal, wandered off.

As he stood there like an idiot, Dean realized that John didn’t like emotional scenes or being touched anymore than Dean did. Sam was Dean’s exception to the rule; Dean was, up to a point, John’s exception.

It made him wonder if John had recognized something in him on the beach because it lived in John too.

The psychologist’s card went into Dean’s wallet and stayed there.

~~

The drive to San Jose was just like old times; sun in their eyes, wind in their hair and Led Zeppelin blaring on the speakers.

They stopped for gas, food and to stretch their legs at the midway mark, some rest stop in Monterey County.

They hadn’t had ‘gas station cuisine’ since right after they’d left their father. While Sam plowed happily through his cheeseburger and onion rings, Dean spat his food out, unable to swallow it.

In truth, he couldn’t swallow the memories that the greasy taste invoked. But Winchesters don’t do emotions, so Dean claimed bad mayo on his burger and let Sam have his fries.

It was one of the last times Dean went anywhere near a fast food joint.


	2. Two Worlds, One Family

While Sam did his college freshman thing, Dean busted his balls to fit in with the San Jose crew he’d been assigned to.

He was the youngest guy in the place. For pity’s sake, the probie running around Engine 14 was two years older and married with a kid on top of that.

Still, Dean got along fairly well with Milt, his Field Training Officer, even though the old guy had a tendency to talk way too much about his daughters and refused to let Dean drive ‘the bus.’

All in all, life was moving right along.

~~

The world goes out from everyone when two planes slam into the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan, just three weeks after they arrive in San Jose. Sam’s getting ready for class and Dean’s at the station, watching Good Morning America with the rest of the crew, when it all begins.

Lieutenant Templar’s girlfriend was actually the first one to come searching for comfort, but she wasn’t the last. Sam arrives just before Tower Two falls, and by nightfall, the station is packed with helpless, frustrated and scared people.

That’s the day the Winchester brothers finally learn that it’s okay for men to cry.

~~

Engine 77 hadn’t forgotten them, and as soon as Dean and Sam were settled in, postcards and packages turned up on their doorstep.

Grammie’s chocolate chip cookies tasted just as good after a week in the mail as they did fresh out of her oven. Dean shared the wealth with Sam on the condition that Sam mailed the Tupperware back as soon as they finished the goodies and washed the bowls out. It started a trend, but that was okay because, hey, cookies.

Also in those packages were Cam’s surplus of magazines. Dean kept promising himself he was going to get his own subscriptions, but never got around to it. The story Dean sticks to is that it’s better for the environment to recycle.

Teyla sent Sam’s favorite teas, since he’d bitterly discovered that no one in San Jose stocked them. He sent back samples for her to try of the few good ones he did find.

Evan sent up a package of the summer’s last jams and jellies from the farmer’s market, and the first of the fruit butters. Since everyone had a computer, there was almost always a chat going on in cyberspace between the three of them. Once in awhile, Sam would miss the sound of Evan’s voice and they’d talk on the phone for a bit, with Dean adding commentary if he happened to be home.

Daniel emailed a couple of times a week and so did John. Postcards were Ronon’s idea of email - he hated computers - and he bought whatever crazy thing he saw at the tourist traps on the beach. They turned up once a week, usually with just a single line printed on them. “Hey.” and “How’s life?” were the most common.

It amused Dean to no end to find equally insane cards and send them back with TV quotes or song lyrics on them. Even if he did have to do it when Sam wasn’t around.

For whatever reason, Sam hated Ronon. The lifeguard had tried once or twice to get into Sam‘s good graces, but Sam wasn’t having any of it. They were polite to each other if forced into close proximity, but they’d never be friends.

When he let himself think about it, Dean knew Sam was jealous. Dean’s reaction to Ronon had never dimmed, and the more he got to know the guy over the summer, the more he thought they’d be good together if things were different.

Sam never outright did anything to the cards Ronon sent, but sometimes certain ones he really didn’t like met with accidents.

It was weird, but with more people his own age and I.Q around, Sam should have gotten less clingy and more independent. In Long Beach he’d ended up as 77’s mascot because he spent so much time with them.

San Jose wasn’t like Long Beach though, and not counting ‘The Nightmare‘ of that day in September, Sam couldn‘t hang out at 14 like that. Additionally, while Dean could go up to Stanford’s campus, he wasn’t comfortable there.

By November, Dean started to see what John was talking about when he said their relationship wasn’t healthy.

The entire crew was out in front of the station, hosing down the trucks and shining everything up for inspection. Various neighbors occasionally wandered past to enjoy the muscled flesh on display.

There wasn’t anything that could be done about it. The trucks needed a thorough cleaning and the only place to do it was outside. Cleaning required water, and clothing got wet. Most of the guys took the ogling as a joke, but Templar made it clear that if anyone couldn’t play the game, he’d assign them something to do inside. Milt was cleaning the kitchen, but Dean chose to ‘tough it out.’

He just had to call Sam to bring his spare uniform in case the horsing around with the hoses got out of hand.

One of the voyeurs decided to flirt with Dean while he shined the ambulance’s hubcaps. Sam turned up at the wrong moment, and didn’t take the comments he overheard kindly. He kept his voice down and his hands to himself, but he definitely staked a claim.

The incident left most of the crew at 14 thinking Sam was Dean’s lover and that the whole ‘brother’ story was an ingrained reflex from living somewhere homophobic - like the old tale of ‘we’re just roommates.’

Templar delicately reminded Dean that California had same sex domestic partner laws and that as such, Sam could be added to Dean’s benefits package, but Dean refused to explain or elaborate anything even then, so the subject eventually died out.

This is California baby, where there’s other, weirder shit around to talk about.

~~

Coming up on Thanksgiving, one of Ronon’s cards was an invite to a turkey dinner with the gang. They regretfully turned it down because Dean was working on Black Friday and there wasn’t time to drive down or money to fly.

They invited Evan and John up though, and made contact with Bobby for the first time since they’d parted ways with their father in April. Despite Sam’s original plans, he’d never quite gotten up the nerve to send his graduation photos to their uncle.

Wednesday morning, Sam signed for another package from Grammie; one sweet potato pie and one pumpkin pie somehow surviving the trip north intact. He called Cam immediately and asked him to convey his and Dean’s appreciation for the gift.

It was a different story that afternoon, when Bobby showed up driving his tow truck, a 1970 Ford Mustang Boss 302 on the hook behind him as a belated eighteenth birthday gift to Sam.

Sam started to refuse it, worried it was being passed along from their father, and managed to hurt Bobby’s feelings pretty badly.

 

Dean called during the argument, asking if they needed anything from the store before he got home. Sam relayed what was going on, and Dean made him hand the phone to Bobby.

It took every bit of diplomacy Dean had ever learned to calm the situation down enough that their uncle agreed to stay like they’d planned.

It helped that Dean was working and hadn’t actually seen Bobby yet, so Bobby leaving early just wasn’t fair.

~~

That evening, Evan turned up with his mother’s recipe book and the fresh killed turkey he and Sam had arranged for.

Unfortunately, Evan also brought the news that John was stuck in Long Beach. Pendergast, John’s backup, had been forced into medical retirement, leaving LA County short handed. Staffing little Sky Eye might be easy for the police, but finding people that could handle the much bigger Life Flight helicopters was a constant pain in the fire department’s ass. It might be a while before Dean got to see his mentor again.

Dean mumbled unhappily under his breath while he helped carry things up to the apartment, but the first meeting between Bobby and Evan perked him up again.

As expected, Bobby muttered ‘Christo’ a few times and spiked Evan’s iced tea with holy water when he thought no one was watching.

Evan drank it without any sign that he knew what Bobby had done. At dinner though, he offered up a small bottle of elderberry wine and didn’t mention that it had been consecrated by a Wiccan High Priestess until after Bobby had taken a nice sized swallow of it.

Sam cracked up first at the look on their uncle’s face, followed by Dean. Bobby and Evan would never be best friends, but they were amiable associates, and that would work just fine.

~~

Sam insisted on watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade from beginning to end, eating his breakfast in front of the television and refusing to move or change the channel during the commercial breaks.

Dean pissed and moaned about it, but he stuck by his brother’s side, bickering with him over the balloons and floats.

They never noticed Bobby and Evan watching them with pity in their eyes.

~~

Cruelty free, organic and locally grown had become Sam’s watchwords since they’d settled down in California. Dean didn’t know whether to blame Evan, Teyla or that weird chick Sam worked with at Java, but he had to admit that the ‘free range’ turkey sitting on their table looked a hell of a lot better than the ‘factory farm’ version 14 was serving up.

Once you added the homemade stuffing instead of the boxed kind, and the fresh veggies instead of the canned, there was no contest.

Still didn’t make Sam any less weird.

Stomach happily full, Dean fell asleep listening to John on the speakerphone, swearing a blue streak at Evan and Bobby as his Dallas Cowboys were slaughtered by their San Francisco 49ers. The brothers Winchester had, sensibly, refused to choose sides in the epic football match-up.

~~

There was no question about spending a couple days in Long Beach for the holidays, even if it meant driving back on Christmas morning to make Dean’s evening shift.

Christmas hadn’t been something they celebrated with any kind of regularity after Sam turned eight and read their father’s journal. It was as if, once that final line of secrecy was crossed, John Winchester didn’t bother trying to be a normal father anymore.

The only reason to bother with the whole mess this year was because of the nuts down at 77, and a confluence of events that made a mini-vacation possible.

Being off on Thanksgiving had been a quirk of scheduling and no more than that. The same quirk had Dean working both Christmas and New Year’s, so when the invitation came from Ronon to hang out with everyone, Dean turned him down without thinking about it. Likewise, Sam turned down Teyla and Daniel’s offers to come stay with them instead of being alone.

Then one of the paramedics over at Engine 81 divorced her husband and decided to use some of her personal days to get her shit together, leaving 81 short-handed. Dean picked up three of Denise’s shifts as overtime, and after she came back to work, she offered to return the favor so he could enjoy one of the holidays at home.

It took a little juggling, between her schedule and his, but they managed to work out a nice chunk of time between his shifts. Taking away the fourteen hour round trip to Long Beach and back, Dean would still have two days free and clear to party however he pleased.

Evan warned them he wasn’t much for the “Jolly Ole Saint Nick” stuff, so John offered to host a small dinner party at his place for the four of them and Bobby. He firmly stated that Evan was expected to eat dinner, nothing else, while Sam turned on his puppy eyes. How Sam managed to do that over an IM was one of Life’s Little Mysteries, but it worked. They’d stay at 77 for the Company’s Winter Blow Out, bunk at John’s place the following night, and leave from Evan’s on Christmas morning.

~~

Christmas shopping baffled the hell out of Dean, so he left ‘the choosing of tiny trinkets’ - quoting a drunk Daniel - to Sam.

Even if he wasn’t The World’s Worst Shopper, people were going crazy out on the streets and Dean didn’t really have time to go anywhere except to a scene, to the hospital and back to the station.

They ended up having to mail Bobby’s gift to him because he was ‘ass deep in alligators’ and wouldn’t be joining them.

Before they could offer to help somehow, he’d hung up.

~~

The day they were leaving, Dean asked Templar if he could park the Impala behind the fire station where she would be safe while they were gone and was offered the Lieutenant‘s garage instead. Sam picked Dean up after work, and they enjoyed a leisurely ride down the coast, even stopping at a motel for the night instead of pushing on.

When they pulled up at 77 the next afternoon, Cameron joked about missing “Dean’s Baby” but stuck his nose under the hood of “Sam‘s Lady“ happily enough. Dean just shook his head, accepted the madness, and left his brother and Cam discussing the Mustang while he searched for John.

He found his mentor half-sitting on Jack’s desk, driving O’Neill up a wall. Jack welcomed Dean back, then told him to “take this pest and scram outta here.”

Dean did, but before they got a chance to talk, Jack blasted out of his office as Chuck - that day’s dispatcher - hit the alarm.

Adrenaline pumped uselessly as Dean’s training told him to go grab his gear - left back in San Jose - and get his ass moving. Seeing a guy green as a shamrock and clumsy as a snake with legs jumping into his bus alongside Jenn pissed him off.

Sam came up and laid his hand on Dean’s shoulder. He didn’t understand what Dean was feeling, he just knew it was there and it was bad. John watched them for a heartbeat, then found a way to change the nonexistent subject.

~~

(2002)

Grammie sent Dean’s favorite carrot cake up for his birthday in January, but it didn’t survive the trip in as good a shape as the pies had, let alone the cookies.

That was okay. The cream cheese icing, once it was wiped out of the bowl and sucked off Sam’s fingers, turned out to be just as tasty without the cake.

~~

February 16th, 2002

San Jose Mercury News.

A 23-year-old paramedic with the city's emergency medical services was struck by a car early Friday afternoon.

 

Dean Winchester, of Engine Company 14, was attending to victims of an auto accident on the corner of Park Avenue and West Street when a car sped through the police barricade and struck him. He was airlifted to the San Jose Trauma Center where he remains in serious but stable condition. The driver of the car fled the scene after the accident, and witnesses were unable to give a license plate number.

Police have issued a Be On the Look Out for a late model, green Honda Accord with damage on the passenger side, including a shattered headlight and turn signal, in connection to this incident.

~~

Bobby called, asking for an update long before Sam had even considered letting the man know what happened.

Their uncle hadn’t suddenly turned psychic. MediStar One’s pilot recognized Dean’s jeweled caduceus as the unofficial insignia for Life Flight Alpha, so she immediately called Alpha’s pilot, her old Air Force buddy John. From him, the news went to Evan and then over to Bobby.

Abraham Ellis, the bean counting bastard in charge of the Life Flight Air Rescue Division of the LA County Fire Department, refused to let John take time off to sit at Dean’s bedside, stating it wasn’t a family emergency since Dean wasn’t actually related to him.

Steven Caldwell, bane of Ellis’s existence and pilot for Life Flight Beta, loudly suggested that John take his talents to San Jose and the MediStar squad permanently rather than put up with the bullshit. Having a foster daughter of his own, Caldwell even offered to quit with John and really put a kink in Ellis’s shorts.

They were in the process of writing out their resignations - which were along the lines of “Fuck you and the horse you rode in on” - when Ellis gave in, allowing John to take three days.

After calling in a favor from his friend with the plane, John and Evan were on their way north.

~~

Engine 14 had set up base camp inside the Trauma Center in a show of support for one of their own.

Despite it, when Evan and John walked into the waiting room, Sam was sitting alone in a corner.

Without acknowledging the confused stares of the gathered firefighters, Evan knelt in front of Sam and gently pulled the young man into his arms. A moment later, Sam buried his face in Evan’s neck as his breathing grew ragged with suppressed tears.

Unable to do anything else, John touched Sam’s hair once, then shrugged out of his coat, laying it on the floor against the wall for Evan to use as a backrest. Task complete, he turned and slipped out of the room to gather intel.

~~

Hamilton Blake, known to his friends as Milt, has been Dean’s partner since September and doesn’t know a damn thing about the boy.

Grim as the situation is, he’s almost thankful for the chance to maybe have some of his questions answered.

Yeah, right.

Templar called the number listed on Dean’s emergency contact sheet and gotten Sam, but the kid’s not in a talking mood once he arrives at the hospital. Milt can’t blame him really, but it’s damn frustrating.

Sam’s been around the station a few times, but he only stays long enough to drop off or pick up something. Usually you can get a ‘hello’ out him, occasionally no more than a wave before he leaves. There’s an opinion around 14 that Sam’s stuck up, but Milt doesn’t believe it. He can’t when he’s got Dean riding next to him, and God knows he’s just as reluctant to make idle conversation as Sam is.

Milt’s never liked when things are quiet. It’s one reason he married the noisiest woman he knew and raised up a gaggle of children as soon as he came home from ‘Nam. First couple of weeks with Dean, Milt knows damn well he talked too much, but he just couldn’t take it.

Sitting in the waiting room of the hospital, he’s thanking God the rest of the crew is there, because silence seems to be a way of life for the Winchesters, if that’s who those two men with Sam are.

Milt’s pretty sure the taller guy’s their father; he has Dean’s eyes and Sam’s build, plus Milt can see the glint of a military issue dog tag chain peeking out from the collar of the guy’s shirt. Dean once mentioned in passing that his father was a Marine, and this man does stand and behave exactly like the leathernecks Milt use to know.

So, with Mr. Winchester identified, that makes the one Sam was hugging Bobby, who started all that ruckus on Thanksgiving over Sam’s car. No one knew Dean could speak Latin until after he got off the phone with his uncle and started mumbling under his breath.

Milt’s keeping his mind occupied by contemplating his wife’s reaction to Mr. Winchester’s youthful appearance when the doctor finally comes out to give everyone an update.

The hospital will be keeping Dean for a few days for observation, but he’s going to be fine. The worst of his injuries is a concussion, with the next on the list being a tie between the fractures in three of his ribs and the fractures in both of the bones in his right forearm. That Dean’s legs, hips, back and skull weren’t broken to pieces was proof his guardian angel must’ve been working overtime.

Dean’s badly bruised and sore as hell, but he’s awake and mostly coherent. He’ll be able to have more visitors once he’s settled in a room. Right now though, he’s looking for ‘his Sam’.

Milt watches the man he thinks is Bobby nudge Sam forward, and the kid follows behind the doctor with a relieved sigh. Once they’re out of earshot, Bobby drops into a crouch and blows out a hard breath, his head hanging, while Mr. Winchester looks at the ceiling and echoes Sam‘s quiet sigh.

Milt didn’t get a single one of his questions answered, but somehow, knowing that Dean’s family loves him is enough for today.

~~

When John’s three days’ grace is over, Dean’s able to stay awake for an more than hour at a time, and he uses it to keep his mentor from getting into trouble on his account.

Grumbling and bitching under his breath about Ellis, duty and smart aleck kids, John reluctantly returns to Long Beach in time to make his assigned shift. He calls once or twice a day, checking in and offering Dean a distraction whenever he’s bored.

Bobby waited for more news before he made the decision to sit this one out. If Sam had been on his own, he would’ve come in a heartbeat. However, with Evan and John both lending a hand, he stayed home. He calls every couple of days to see what’s going on, but ‘doesn’t want to be a damn Nanny Nuisance.’

~~

Evan stayed for two weeks, keeping Sam steady and helping with the stuff Dean’s battered body prevented him from doing himself. While Dean wasn’t ready to go back to work when Evan left, he was able to forgo his narcotic based painkillers and use plain old ibuprofen instead.

It struck Dean as gruesomely funny that three men, who didn’t share a single drop of blood with him, cared more than his own father did.

Neither he nor Sam ever found out Evan had their father’s empty truck impounded when he saw it lurking outside their apartment building.

That big 4x4 with it’s Kansas license plate sure was easy to recognize.

~~

Exam stress starts getting to Sam in March. He’s short tempered and easily frustrated. The lack of sleep from constant studying makes him paranoid and Dean finds pieces of three postcards he never got to see in the trash can as Sam’s jealousy comes roaring out.

When Dean’s given the chance to head to San Diego for an advanced Pediatrics class, Sam completely loses it.

Dean barely convinces the neighbor not to call the cops when she comes banging on the door to make sure they’re not killing each other. While he’s dealing with her, Sam leaves by the fire escape and vanishes.

Still pissed - that class would knock his paycheck up another couple hundred bucks a year - Dean doesn’t go looking for him. He cleans up the apartment, cleans himself up, and heads into work.

Alone in the ambulance later that night, restocking everything he and Milt had used on their last run, Dean stares long and hard at their supply of sedatives.

He doesn’t steal any, but it’s a near enough thing that he puts in his first call to Dr. Heightmeyer.

~~

Sam’s so contrite and guilty for his freak out the next evening that it’s easy for Dean to talk him into going to see the shrink in the morning.

He comes out of her office afterwards looking more like the old Sam and Dean thanks God for it. His bruises from the accident have only just faded out, his ribs are still tender and his wrist is still in a brace - he doesn’t need to get smacked around again.

He never once considers going to talk to Dr. Heightmeyer himself.

He doesn’t go to San Diego either.

~~

Abraham Ellis takes a job in Chicago, and Steven Caldwell gets the top slot. Remembering John’s story of how he’d had to fight to get time off when Dean got hurt, and how Steven stood beside him, Dean sends the guy a gift basket.

It contains a pair of scissors, two bottles of Maalox, four bottles of aspirin, and a fifth of Jack Daniels hidden under three pounds of Dunkin’ Donuts finest coffee beans.

~~

Four days into April, there’s a fire at Milt’s house. The house Dean had been invited to a hundred times and never went.

Engine 14 calls all hands on deck and breaks the speed of sound getting there, but no matter how hard Dean pounds on his partner’s chest or how high he cranks up the defibrillator, he can’t get Milt’s heart started again.

McManus from 39 has better luck with Milt’s wife, but they lose her in the hospital eighteen hours after she arrives.

The bodies of Milt’s eldest daughter and infant grandson are found near the point of origin. The cause of the fire is believed to be a defective bottle warmer too close to the baby’s crib. The company had been on the news announcing a recall the night before everything happened.

Milt had six smoke and four heat detectors scattered through the house, all in working order. Yet there’s no explanation for why none of them went off.

~~

A week later, Dean helps carry his partner to his final resting place and steps back to watch the other three caskets laid down beside Milt’s. John’s somewhere in the back of the crowd at the cemetery, officially representing Long Beach, and Dean draws strength from his presence.

He needs it more when he gets to the station that night and sees his father there.

John Winchester hasn’t changed in the year since Dean and Sam left him. He wants Dean to use his credentials to get him past the honor guard and into the ruins of Milt’s house to take EMF readings. Dean informs his father that he’s not a firefighter, everyone knows he’s not a firefighter, and therefore, he can’t do shit.

His father persists, telling him that Milt’s grandson was exactly six months old the night of the fire. Just like Sam was when their mother died.

Dean’s tired patience fractures. Hurt, anger and disappointment come pouring out and it’s only the screech of tires and Sam’s hand on his chest that keep him out of his father’s personal space while he snarls at him.

Then John’s there, standing between the Winchester brothers and their father as Sam gets Dean inside the station house.

Through the white noise in his head, Dean hears the distinctive drawl of his mentor‘s voice as John warns their father to back off.

Twenty five years ago, John Winchester was a Marine. For the last nineteen years, he’s been hunting the things that go bump in the night.

Five years ago, John Sheppard was a roto-pilot the Air Force. For the last four years, he’s been doing the same job for Los Angeles County.

John Winchester tries talking to Sam, tries to bull past Sheppard.

He quickly learns that you don’t fuck with someone under Sheppard’s protection. Most especially if that someone is Dean.

~~

There’s a new saying around 14 that even fill-ins from other stations know :

If you see Winchester lose it, make your peace with God.

Dean’s got a kind of control usually seen in twenty year men like McManus or, Baby Jesus hug his soul, Milt. Finding it in a rookie is almost unheard of.

The only other exception Michelle Patterson knows of is way the hell and gone at Engine 22 on the west side of the city. The chick got rescued from Sri Lanka, or some messed up place like it, and nothing fazes her because she’d seen it all from the minute she crawled out of her cradle.

A few people, hearing about Dean, wanted to match Yarshaya’s Immoveable Object up with his Irresistible Force and see which one cracked first, but none of the Terror Attack Drills have required 22 and 39 to be in the same place at the same time.

Kneeling on the sidewalk, administering a cold pack and a butterfly bandage to the old man who claimed to be Dean’s father, Michelle wonders what the hell the guy did to his kid that turned Dean into a match for a girl who spent most of her childhood avoiding rapists and murderers.

She wonders if the man deserved more than the single punch that laid him out on the concrete.

When he tries to talk to her about his sons - and ain’t that a kick, Sam really is Dean’s brother - she shuts him down. He’s hurt, she’s a paramedic earning her paycheck, that’s it. Mediating family disputes is not in her job description.

After making him sign a release form - John E. Winchester - Michelle cleans up the scattered wrappers and used gauze before peeling off her gloves, stuffing her equipment into her bag and getting to her feet. Her parting shot to her former patient is that no matter who he is, he should’ve realized today would be a real bad day to have a reunion when he saw the station house draped in black.

Still under Templar’s watchful eye - the rest of the guys having rejoined the wake - Michelle pauses long enough to slam the doors on Sam’s car closed and snatch up the Tupperware containers of cookies that someone had dropped.

Then she and Templar go back inside and leave John E. Winchester to himself.

~~

Sitting on the curb as the girl leaves, his lip split and his jaw aching, it takes a moment for him to realize his youngest son never even looked at him.

He’s too busy calling himself four kinds of a fool and eight kinds of jackass.

Hasn’t seen his boys face to face in over a year, and the first thing he talks about to his eldest is a damn job.

No matter that it could involve the de-- the thing that killed Mary. Dean had been right; “would it really have been such a problem to ask “How are you?” before he brought up the old firefighter’s death?

Of course it wouldn’t have, but damned if he could think of anything else to say.

~~

With the fiscal year in lousy shape and coming to a close in two months time, the city

is bitching about the budget and everything else.

Even though he knew it would happen, it still surprises Dean when Templar hands him a set of paperwork transferring him back to Engine 77 a few days after Sam’s birthday.

The federal government thinks Los Angeles is a larger, shinier target for terrorism than San Jose. They’re already running some seriously nasty mass-casualty drills down there and much more complex bioterrorism classes. Long Beach, due to it’s proximity to “Tinsel Town,” is at risk of having it’s Emergency Services overrun or conscripted into service in “The City” if anything does happen, so they’re being trained to within inches of their sanity as well.

Lieutenant O’Neill’s request for experienced paramedics to fill his ranks for the next three months is formally worded, but Templar shows Dean the personal note O’Neill crammed into the envelope along with it. “Send Winchester home will ya? He’ll come back smarter, we promise.”

Dean will have been on the job over a year when he returns, making him qualified to ride herd on whatever E.M.T’s 14 gets stuck with. So he’ll be doing his station a favor by going down to 77 and getting the latest in information.

That’s Howard Templar’s story, and he’s by God sticking to it.

The reality is, he’s been worried about Dean for well over a month. The boy is as steady as Gibraltar when he’s in the field, but he‘s more of a social misfit now than he was when he was first assigned to 14.

They had gotten use to him always sitting with his back against the wall, and always refusing to go out for a beer or a game of darts after shift.

They’d gotten use to him avoiding the Wednesday poker games or the weekend pool tournaments.

And after an accident up in the sleeping quarters - The Crib - they’d even gotten use to Dean taking naps in the backseat of his old Chevy.

However, after five weeks, they’re still not use to a Dean who spends most of his spare time alone in the parking lot, working on Michelle’s car. She buys the parts, he puts them on. By Templar’s estimate, the only thing the boy hasn’t repaired or replaced on that piece of shit is the paint job.

It’s stress relief, plain and simple. Some guys play basketball, Dean does auto repair. Templar wouldn’t be so worried if it actually seemed to help.

A couple of the guys are convinced that Milt’s passing wasn’t as upsetting to Dean as that crazy guy turning up right afterwards. That might be the case, it might not, but Templar’s sure that some time away from San Jose will do Dean good.

Sure as hell can’t hurt him.


	3. Careless Whispers

Dean uses a couple days personal leave to pack up the apartment and clean it to within an inch of it’s existence while Sam finishes his classes at Stanford.

Most of their stuff goes into storage, and what they’re taking with them fits into the trunks of the cars. Sam’s not leaving his Mustang, and Dean refuses to be away from the Impala for thirteen solid weeks, so they’re caravanning it, bitching and griping back and forth on a pair of CB radios Dean scrounged up and repaired.

Summer’s here so let the good times roll.

~~

Once back in their old stomping grounds, Sam stops off at Jonesin’ 4 Java and charms his way back into a job. Watching his little brother fix some ridiculously complicated coffee to prove he hasn‘t forgotten anything, Dean can only shake his head and laugh.

~~

They offered to rent a place, but Evan gave them the hairy eyeball until they relented and agreed to move back in with him. He doesn’t want to be paid, so they don’t tell him about their bi-weekly deposits to his checking account.

In turn, he doesn’t tell them about buying stocks and bonds in their names with said deposits. Playing with Wall Street is tricky, but Evan figures that if he sticks with companies that have Defense Department contracts, the boys will be making money at least until the end of the ‘War on Terror‘. Afterwards, something else will be going strong and Evan can buy stock in that instead.

Right now, the boys aren’t hurting for cash, but Sam’s been talking about becoming a lawyer, and law school will cost a pretty penny that Dean‘s salary won‘t have a prayer of covering.

Evan’s only known the boys for a year, but they’ve become his only living family, and he’s gonna look after them the best that he can.

~~

About to get his first paycheck from Java, Sam convinced Dean to help him move the furniture in Evan’s guest room around so that they could fit a cheap futon in there and give the illusion that they preferred separate beds.

The futon went north with them, serving as Sam’s bed at Thanksgiving - Bobby taking ‘his’ room - and then giving Evan a comfortable place to sleep in February. The night they stayed with Evan over Christmas, they ‘made do’ and shared the guest room‘s bed.

Sam brought up the idea of getting another futon when they come back in June, only to have Evan shake his head. It’s time the boys made themselves at home, and he’s been clearing out the junk in the basement for the last three months to give them the space to do it in.

They’re not expecting it when he pushes the ads for a furniture store across the table and calmly offers his opinion on one of the king-size bedroom sets.

Sam freezes, and the joke Dean’s about to crack dies unspoken when Evan gives him a ‘how stupid do you think I am?’ look.

Evan doesn’t bother telling them how or when he found out, but he’s fine with what they get up to in the privacy of their room. Sam manages to splutter out a ‘why?’ and gets a shrug before Evan answers pretty much the way John had. There’s not going to be any mutant spawn as a result of them having sex, and neither one of them is forcing the other.

Unlike John, who copes with the knowledge by not thinking about it and by praying Sam hooks up with Teyla - or Dean hooks up with Ronon - Evan’s content to leave things as they are. Well, in regards to everything but the furniture.

Finishing off his juice, Evan heads out to run errands while Sam and Dean try to relearn how to breathe.

~~

It takes a week of working every spare minute, but the basement is set up to everyone’s satisfaction.

What used to be one huge space with a bathroom at one end and a utility room at the other becomes two separate sections thanks to some sturdy wooden partitions Sam finds at Home Depot. Evan can access the storage room and the laundry without ever having to set foot in the area Dean and Sam have claimed as their own.

Sam adapts to the new living arrangements easily, but Dean has a little trouble with them.

Knowing that he can have sex with Sam whenever he wants, instead of just when Evan’s out, takes some getting use to. Sam helps with the adjusting period by sleeping naked most of the time, just like he does up in San Jose.

One morning, after a truly hideous shift, Dean comes home, strips off his clothes and crawls into bed, wanting the comfort of Sam’s touch so bad he could scream. For the first time, it doesn’t matter that seven feet and one ceiling/floor separate them from Evan, who’s in the kitchen making breakfast. Dean needs Sam and the rest of the world can just go to hell.

~~

The summer goes quickly and quietly. Sam puts in his two week notice at the coffee shop. Jack reluctantly hands over the paperwork that sends Dean back to San Jose. Engine 14 lost their ambulance crew to budget cuts and since McManus is retiring, Dean will be working out of 39 this year as senior paramedic, second shift. He knows Michelle and one or two other people over there well enough to wave at off-duty, so it’s no big deal.

With four dozen cookies riding shotgun in the Impala, and the last of the ‘see you next year’ cake in the Mustang, the Winchester boys head north to a new apartment and Sam’s second year of school.

~~

Dean’s new partner is a wet-behind-the-ears former Eagle Scout who instantly hits every piss off button Sam has.

It takes all of a month before Sam starts driving Dean up the wall with the smart remarks about Timothy-not-Tim.

The first time Sam does something he feels guilty for, Dean doesn’t hold out and hope for the best. He hauls Sam’s ass straight back to Dr. Heightmeyer. With as much as Dean pays for Sam’s private medical insurance, they’re gonna get some damn use out of it.

Sam seems to realize he’s got a problem, because he continues seeing the psychologist even after his behavior levels out again. All Dean knows on the subject is that Heightmeyer prescribes some vitamin, mineral, and amino acid supplements based on blood test results, suggests Sam use a little Unisom if he absolutely can’t sleep, and that‘s it for drug therapy. The rest seems to be meditation and talking things out.

She’s different for a shrink. No better living through pharmaceuticals for her patients, and that’s something Dean can get behind.

Enough that he doesn’t fight too hard when Sam brings home a bottle of multivitamins just for him. Dean hates trying to swallow the horse sized Centrum for Men each morning, but he does it to make Sam happy.

Sauce for the goose and all that.

~~

John and Evan make it for Thanksgiving, but Bobby doesn’t. He won’t say why, but Dean and Sam are sure it’s got something to do with hunting.

Since they left their father, Bobby keeps the Ghostbusters type talk down to an absolute minimum. When it does come up, he treats it like a theological/philosophical subject, totally different from the fact of life manner he had when they were younger.

The food is still superior, the company great, but Dean feels like the Grand Canyon has sprung up between them and their uncle.

~~

Half of 39 are sick as dogs come Christmas, the flu making its way through the ranks. They recover and the other half spends New Year’s miserable.

McManus still has his certification, so he steps up to the plate as a volunteer and partners Dean when Timothy-not-Tim goes down.

It’s the most quiet week Dean’s had since he’s been on the job.

~~

(2003)

During a pounding rain storm, Dean finally meets one of Sam’s teachers. The rest of 39 is busy cutting her out of her car, and he’s in the middle of putting an I.V. in her arm when she reads his name badge and asks if he knows a Sam Winchester.

Knowing she wants a distraction from her pain and fear, Dean confirms her student is his brother, and they force themselves to ‘casually’ chit-chat about her classes until it’s time to load her into the bus.

 

He never asked what Sam’s grade was before that night, but Sam passes with flying colors.

~~

Dean’s last night in San Jose before being ‘exiled’ to 77 for the summer is insane.

The police contact 39 for a transport on a rape case, female victim.

Lieutenant Dawson looks at Dean. Dean looks at Lieutenant Dawson and goes off to call Michelle out of her comfortable bed. There’s no way he’s taking Timothy-not-Tim along on this one. Not after the comments the little bastard made during the last sexual assault run they had.

Since Michelle’s place is on the way, Dean decides to pick her up rather than wait for her to drive in and both of them leave from the station house.

Timothy-not-Tim throws a fit at being left out, and Dean can hear him carrying on as he pulls the ambulance out of the bay and into the night.

Dean snags Michelle running down her street and they hit the scene six minutes after the call out.

There’s two male cops whose faces are starting to turn lovely colors standing next to their patrol cars. Behind them is a patty wagon bouncing on it’s axles as someone screams their lungs out inside.

Michelle grabs her bag and follows a pair of female officers up to the victim. The plan is to get the lady calmed down enough that Dean’s presence won’t panic her when it’s time for the stretcher.

Since he’s got nothing to do for the next three minutes or so, Dean heads over to the patrol car and passes out two chemical ice packs and some ibuprofen to the bruised and battered officers, checking for concussions at the same time.

Michelle radios that the victim is calm enough for Dean to come up when all hell breaks loose.

The patrol wagon’s doors are punched off their hinges and the dude inside comes bursting out, still screaming incoherently.

The doors were enough of a clue, but Dean spots the black eyes and knows the man’s possessed. Swearing under his breath, Dean doesn’t hesitate, hitting the bastard with everything he’s got before anyone else recovers from the surprise.

The two cops wade in a minute later, then five more after Dean’s thrown into the ambulance, but they’re outmatched.

The demon is strangling one of the police officers when Dean jumps on it’s back and jams a syringe full of sedatives into it’s host’s chest.

He’s never remembered all the exorcism rituals they’ve used over the years, but one is falling from his lips like water over rock as he presses the plunger in. The second the host body starts to slump, Dean yanks the needle out - barely noticing the dosage he used - and continues the chant as he rides the guy down to the ground.

The host convulses and thick black smoke pours from his mouth. Dean continues chanting, there’s an inhuman shriek, a flash of red light and then the smoke is gone.

The former host is going to happy land, courtesy of the drugs Dean pumped him full of, and is nice and calm under the officers’ restraining hands. Dean crawls off the guy and staggers across the asphalt to his ambulance, adrenaline wreaking havoc through his entire body, twisting his guts inside out.

He pulls himself inside to try repairing the mess he made when he was thrown and the second mess he made going after the syringe and medicine. Michelle’s on the radio, calling for him, the police are outside trying to figure out what the hell just happened and what they’re supposed to do next, but Dean’s a blank. His only thought is to get the bus back together so the girl upstairs can go to the hospital.

There’s more cops, and two other ambulance crews pull up. Denise from 81 picks the forgotten, half-empty syringe up from the ground and bags it. Dean can only nod at her when she asks if it was completely full when he used it.

It doesn’t register he’s got another concussion until just then, when he throws up.

So much for a fucking normal, demon free life.

~~

The investigation into what happened is a formality. The cops on the scene sing Dean’s praises for saving their asses. When he jumped the guy the second time - while suffering from a concussion after being thrown into his own ambulance don‘t forget - the suspect had his hands around an officer’s throat. Tasers and guns were likely to hurt the patrolman as much as the suspect. Batons and fists weren’t getting through whatever drugs the man was on. What was in the syringe - Diazepam as it turned out - did.

Yes, what Dean did could have killed the suspect, but it was a case of the suspect’s life versus the life of a police officer and Dean’s own existence. Not to mention that only God knows what the body count would have been if the suspect had decided to grab the gun off the officer he’d been strangling.

Dean Winchester saved lives that night. Period.

The Mayor and Police Commissioner want to award Dean a medal. The Fire Chief wants to crucify him. They compromise and let life go on as planned.

He’s nearly two weeks late returning to 77, but their welcome is as warm as always.

~~

For the very first time, Dean and Sam are going to be around for 77’s carnival, thanks to some kind of scheduling screw-up that Laura refuses to explain.

Dean spends most of his time at the first aid station except for two memorable stints as a Bingo caller and one forgettable one as Security.

Sam, by virtue of being an idle body around the station house, is drafted into helping Teyla with the face painting booth. He has a blast turning little children into flower cheeked fairies, camouflaged soldiers and the ever popular cat.

Life Flight Alpha is brought to the sand and set down so people can gawk over her. John hates answering some of the stupid questions he’s given, but he hates being around the clowns at the carnival more, so he puts up with the tourists. On the second day, Laura and Cameron make the Ferris wheel a clown free zone so John can go up on it and relax when he needs to.

That solution is preferable to him hitting the dunking booth every two hours and sending whomever is on duty into the tank.

~~

Dean’s off shift the last night of the carnival, when 77 is holding it’s annual company barbeque.

There’s nothing available that’s stronger than beer, but he knows better than to touch those, sticking to lemonade.

He still finds himself doing something very, very stupid when he stumbles into Ronon during the final sweep of the funhouse at closing.

Ronon’s chest is under Dean’s palms, Ronon’s brown eyes locked to Dean’s green ones.

The kiss is hot.

The hand around Dean’s cock is perfect.

Right up until he calls Ronon “Sam.”

~~

Sam figures out pretty quick that something’s up, but since Dean’s staying as far away from Ronon as he can get, he’s happy.

John figures out something’s wrong just as fast, but he’s less than pleased the pair are avoiding each other. Since Ronon’s not talking, he goes to Dean and pries the story out of him.

Then he does damage control.

It takes getting Ronon completely wasted for the story to come out the second time. Forcing himself to laugh, John convinces the younger lifeguard that Dean wasn’t talking about Samuel-the-little-brother, he was talking about another one, Samson-the-San-Jose-cop.

Since John’s been up there and is Dean‘s best friend, he should know. Ronon accepts the explanation, and once he’s sobered up, he apologizes to Dean for thinking he’s some kind of freak.

Dean accepts the apology and offers up his own for leading Ronon on. Plus, you know, the whole wrong name thing.

They go back to being just buddies, and Ronon eventually forgets anything ever happened.

Dean never does.

~~

The apartment they left in June is still available, so they sign a two year lease this time and save themselves some trouble for next year.

Sam and Evan go up alone because there’s another Terror Attack Drill on moving day and Dean is up to his ass in bodies at seven am with no end in sight.

Three hundred people ‘camping’ at the arena for tickets to a rock concert are hit with a pair of suicide bombs, one of them truck based.

There’s shrapnel injuries, concussive injuries, massive amounts of shock and confusion. ‘Relatives’ trying to sneak in, people who just want to stand around gawking and take photos. Long Beach must’ve put out a call to Hollywood for actors, because there are more than a few individuals who throw themselves into their roles to the point of driving the Emergency Response personnel out of their minds.

Because the situation is supposed to be treated as completely real, there’s no time for Dean to admire how John manages to drop Alpha down onto a busy street with inches to spare to save a man pretending his legs have been amputated.

Like a real emergency, there’s only time to treat the wounds of the person in front of you and move on to the next one.


	4. All Right Now

Between the TAD and John forcing him to take a nap, Dean manages to leave Long Beach ten hours after Sam set out, getting home just before midnight.

He walks into the apartment and finds Sam and Evan asleep on the couch, Sam’s head on their friend’s thigh.

It used to bother him, seeing them together like that. Hell, it used to bother Evan that Sam kept doing it.

Then Dean got hit by a car, they’d both been hit by the Clue bus, and Sam’s touchy-feely behavior towards Evan stopped bugging them.

Mary Winchester, who died before Sam could remember her, had been replaced as his mother.

Anything Dean - in his fucked up roles as father, brother, friend and lover - anything Dean can’t handle becomes Evan’s department. Minor things like “what do I wear my first day of work“ and “yikes, ten pages on Picasso, shoot me now“ to major stuff like “am-I-on-a-date-with-Teyla-or-just-two-friends-going-the-same-place” all goes to Evan.

The only thing ever actually said on the subject was that Evan looks terrible in skirts and pearls so he’ll keep wearing pants, thanks very much.

~~

Timothy-not-Tim demanded and received a transfer to another company while Dean was in Long Beach. Both Lieutenant Dawson and Dean are happier with his replacement, a girl named Crystal.

Michelle’s thrilled not to be the only filly in a station full of stallions. Not that the guys harass her, but the testosterone can get to be a bit much.

~~

Sam calls from school one afternoon in October, asking Dean to please, please bring his black notebook up to the campus. Since it’s Dean’s day off and he’s got nothing better to do, he agrees.

Sam‘s Lady - and damn Cameron for sticking that name in his head! - is easy to find in a parking lot full of newer model cars, and Dean pulls the Impala in next to her while he waits.

He resists the urge to climb out when he spots Sam heading over. Mainly because Sam is ignoring the pretty brunette chasing after him, and the look on his face is decidedly pissed.

If Dean’s reading their lips right, Sam’s refusing to lend the girl his notes for some class they share and she’s trying to convince him otherwise. Little Miss hasn’t figured out that she’s whining, and that’s no way to get Sam to do you a favor.

The only word Dean catches is ‘Jillian’ before Sam spins around to face her. Whatever comes next has Jillian raising her hand to slap him.

Sam sees it coming - of course he does, he’s trained for combat - and simply steps back. Saying something else Dean misses, Sam turns and continues across the parking lot, leaving Jillian standing on the sidewalk.

Dean knows that when he’s working, Sam spends time in the Stanford library, but Dean’s never met any of Sam’s college friends, or even, truthfully, heard anything about them. Once Dean refused to come up to the campus and be social, Sam stopped talking about school with him in any kind of depth. Daniel and Evan are seven hours away and know more about Sam-at-Stanford than Dean does. Hell, John hasn’t stepped foot on the campus in fifteen years plus and knows more about it than Dean.

Watching Jillian storm off across the quad, Dean suddenly wonders if Sam’s been as faithful to him as he’s been to Sam.

~~

Thanksgiving rolls around again, and for the first time, Evan won’t be there. He sends them an email informing them that he’s got laryngitis. It’s thanks to a bacterial infection, and the antibiotics are making him too sick to travel.

Sam wants to go down, but Evan insists he’ll be fine and he’ll come see them for Christmas, they don’t need to worry. John’s been around a few times, and Sam can ride back to Long Beach with him on Black Friday if it turns out that Evan needs any help.

A quick call to John confirms both the story and the promise of assistance, and Sam reluctantly agrees not to skip Tuesday’s classes ‘just for a stupid bug.’

Bobby calls at almost the last minute and won’t be able to make it either.

John‘s still coming up, but finding out he’ll be the only guest makes him uneasy, so he asks Dean if Teyla can join them. He knows Sam would love to see her and she’s off for the weekend this year.

Dean agrees, especially since he won’t be off work until Thursday evening, and from the instant Teyla climbs out of his mentor’s Jeep to the second she gets back in to go home, Sam never stops smiling.

She might not understand football, but she’s not bad company.

~~

Even though he’s still got to stick with soft, easy to swallow foods, Evan does make it for Christmas like he promised. Dean has to work on Christmas Eve, but he gets Dawson’s permission to sneak away and have hot chocolate and sugar cookies with his family at midnight.

They’re watching Harry Potter on TV and mocking Alan Rickman‘s character when Dean unlocks the apartment’s door and strolls inside.

Joining them on the couch, Dean spends his ‘lunch’ hour with a huge grin on his face.

~~

(2004)

Jack surprises the hell out of everyone by calling in March and demanding to know when Sam’s Spring Break is. Confused, Sam tells him, and Jack hangs up.

Two days later, there’s a round trip plane ticket in the mail. First day of vacation departure, arriving home on the very last day.

Apparently, Jack has decided it’s time for the youngest Winchester to officially join the crew he’s been hanging with and helping out for the last three years. When Sam goes back to Stanford after Easter, he’ll either be a lifeguard, or he’ll be dead.

Sam finds a local gym with an indoor pool and starts swimming there twice a day so the latter doesn’t happen.

~~

Lifeguard training usually takes three weeks solid simply because they’re not splashing around in a pool, they’re swimming in the Pacific Ocean. There are environmental concerns to learn about even before they get to all the stupid stuff humans can do.

Everyone at 77 knows by now that anything you teach Dean, he’s going to teach Sam. It’s like the tide; you can’t stop it, so you don’t fight it.

They also know that Sam learns just as fast as big brother, which Jack is taking shameless advantage of.

The instructor for the incoming lifeguards is an old friend, so Jack convinces him to take Sam’s three years’ exposure to the surf bunnies as the bare basics of training. The guy agrees, because Jack isn’t called “Hammer” for nothing, but pushes Sam hard, both in and out of the water, just to be sure he‘s not getting snowed.

What would take fifteen days to cover normally takes Sam eight. Ferretti shakes his head as he hands over the paperwork that’ll assign Sam to 77’s lifeguard division starting Memorial Day weekend.

~~

After calling Dean and telling him the news, Sam turns down the offer from Cam and a bunch of the other guys to go down to the local watering hole and have a drink to celebrate, since he’s finally legal for everything and anything.

Little do they know that Sam’s first beer was at fifteen, in a bar somewhere with a fake I.D, learning to hustle pool. Per Dean’s training, he’d eaten a heavy meal beforehand, and swallowed as little of the beverage as he could get away with. Dean, who hadn’t had such a cautious teacher when he was learning to hustle, could put away four or five bottles a night and feel nothing the next morning.

Eight months later, after Sam turned sixteen, Dean quit drinking, telling anyone who bothered to question him that he was either on medication or probation and couldn’t touch alcohol.

With a little slight of hand and a couple of caps, Sam could keep the same beer with him all night and never take a swallow. Just keep your hand around the top of the bottle, lift it frequently, and work your throat around a mouthful of spit. Easy.

There was no need to play games with Cam and the rest of the gang though. Dean’s tee totaling was fine with 77, who always found other ways to party - like the decision now to go play Paintball and get some pizza afterwards - so Sam’s abstinence was seen as a mature and responsible echo of his big brother.

Totally unlike the ‘old boys’ at 14 and 39. They tended to like their beers after a hard shift, and that Dean wouldn’t go with them drew some smart remarks. Truth was, the brothers Winchester hadn’t stepped foot into a bar or club since the night they met Evan and stopped needing to cheat people for money.

Sam kind of misses playing pool, and he knows his skills are getting rusty, but telling Dean it was okay to have a drink or three would be an admission of guilt, and Sam wasn’t going to do that.

No way was he ever going to tell Dean that the blackouts Dean thought were caused by alcohol; the blackouts that led to him and Sam becoming lovers, were the result of Sam, his trusted baby brother, spiking his drinks and taking advantage.

~~

The trip back to San Jose is uneventful, and so is the time between classes resuming and classes ending for the summer.

Once again, Dean receives his marching orders down to Long Beach, with a two week stint in Los Angeles for specialty HazMat classes. They were supposed to be held in San Diego last November, but the city was still recovering from the wildfires and rescheduled.

After it was too late to go to the ones in Sacramento or Fresno, San Diego decided it didn’t have the money and outright canceled. Since Dawson knew Dean would be returning to 77 anyway, he simply made arrangements for Dean to attend class while he was down there, and saved himself a few headaches.

Even though California’s emergency services are smoother to mix, match and mingle than any other group in the country except Florida, they can still be a pain in the ass.

~~

Sam learns he’s on rotation when he and Dean get back to Long Beach on the Thursday before Memorial Day. Rotation means that rather than being assigned to a single Tower, Sam will spend an hour at each one to give the guard on duty a break. He’s also backup for any guard who needs it.

Knowing the animosity between them, John makes excuses to visit Ronon when Sam’s passing through Tower 21. He finds the pair strictly professional, talking enough to do their jobs but no more than that. If Ronon mentions something he’s learned in the course of his career, Sam listens to the information and integrates it into his memory, regardless of the fact that he doesn’t like the source.

It’s not perfect, but John’s known worse partnerships, so after a couple of days, he stops babysitting them.

~~

Dean survives his time in the City of Angels and returns to 77 with a stack of books and other material he shares with any interested parties around the station, including, of course, Sam and John. Once the stuff has been photocopied and distributed to those who want it, Dean packs the originals up to be mailed out to San Jose.

Michelle took the class when San Francisco offered it last September, and passed her manuals to Dean to prep with for November. Even though the plan was derailed, there’s still plenty of time for Crystal, Michelle’s partner Adam, and whoever is filling in for Dean to study and get their certificates during the last group of classes up in Crescent City in October.

For that matter, McManus might be heading that way himself. The man is bored to tears in his retirement and volunteers enough around 39 that he might as well come back to work and get paid for his time.

It’s Dean’s joking wish that he’ll still love his job just as much when he gets to be McManus’s age.


	5. Tenuous Boundaries

He took a swallow of whiskey, drawing the package closer to him. 

He wanted to open it, but on the other hand, he never wanted to open it. 

They’d abandoned him. 

Three years and they’d never once picked up the phone, called to see if he was still alive. 

He took another swallow, tried to convince himself that it was for the best. Mixed into the ocean that was the normal population, it might be more difficult for that thing to find them. Hunters were like a small pond, and his boys easy targets in it. 

He picked up his knife from the table beside him, slit the tape on the package with one sure, smooth move. 

There was a loose leaf notebook on top, and when he lifted it out and opened it, he found detailed reports, with little color coded tabs scattered throughout. Apparently, Olivia had decided to do things the same way she did for her paying clients. 

Then again, after the Black Dog he’d helped her with, sitting on a beach, taking reports and photos on normal people was a nice vacation. 

Normal people. Dear Christ. Those were words he hadn’t thought about his boys since 1983. 

Sam was easier to follow than Dean, since Sam was confined to the beach, and Dean could roam around half the city on a call. 

He read through Sam’s daily routine, took note of the color highlighter Olivia used for each personal contact, since detailed information on the person would, presumably, be behind the same colored tag further into the notebook. 

Judging from how frequently nine names appeared in relation to Sam, and how only four of those appeared in relationship to Dean, they were living somewhat separate lives even working in the same place. 

Two names kept coming up so frequently that he finally flipped to their sections. 

He took a swig of whiskey, even as his hand came up to rub at his jaw and he forgot the second name. 

Son of a bitch. Taken down by a goddamned zoomie. 

Honorably discharged United States Air Force Major John Phillip Sheppard, to be exact.

There was a distance shot that Olivia took, then a second, official looking photo that showed Sheppard in his Air Force dress blues, confirming her identification. There was no mistaking that Sheppard was the man who punched him two years ago, outside of the fire station Dean was working at. 

He read the pertinent details - Sheppard left the Air Force in 1997, took EMT then paramedic training before finalizing a job as a medevac pilot in ’98. 

Sheppard’s version of ‘moonlighting’ was working as a lifeguard during the summer, out of the same engine house he’d taken his medic training from. 

When they’d had their brief…encounter, he’d figured Sheppard was grieving for a buddy lost in a senseless accident, and he hadn’t retaliated after Sheppard knocked him to the ground. 

But now he knew, Sheppard wasn’t there for the old paramedic who‘d been killed. Sheppard had been in San Jose for Dean, and only for Dean. 

The thought made him reach for the whiskey, taking a good, long drink of it. 

He set the bottle aside, dug into the box on the bed in front of him in order to lift out another notebook. This one was filled with slick plastic sleeves holding photographs. 

The first one was dated in the early morning the day after Olivia arrived. The boys were getting out of that black Mustang Sam drove. 

He had a good idea where the car came from, and it still pissed him off that Bobby hadn’t told him he’d kept in touch with the boys. 

He flipped to the next photo, of his sons stretching and talking with a group of coworkers on the beach. It could’ve been a class picture - all but one of the frequent contacts were there.

Daniel Jackson, Teyla Emmagen, Jonas Quinn, Laura Beckett, Cameron Mitchell, Vala Mal Doran, John Sheppard, and Ronon Dex. 

Sam had filled out considerably since they’d left, no longer a six foot string bean of a teenager. Dean had gained more muscle, especially in the chest and arms, but otherwise looked the same. 

The third photo was of the group taking off in a run down the sand, Dean keeping pace with Sheppard while Sam paired off with Jackson. 

He flipped through the reports to read about Doctor Daniel Jackson, PhD. Double degree in archeology and linguistics. Left the academic world in 1995 after the death of his wife in Egypt, and joined the lifeguards six months later. Been there ever since, forgoing his education to drive a boat. 

Olivia had written a small note to keep this Daniel guy away from Bobby or they’d take over the world, one dead language at a time. More than that, Dr. Jackson had apparently turned into one of Sam‘s teachers because Olivia had heard them ‘bantering’ back and forth in Latin and something of Middle Eastern descent. 

Sam hadn’t known any Arab dialects four years ago. 

The fourth photo was taken in what looked like the afternoon, Dean in his uniform, sitting in the sun and fooling around with something that looked like a radio. 

He wondered if it was something Dean was repairing or experimenting with. Damn kid was almost as bad as MacGyver with his building things out of who knows what. A working EMF meter out of a Walkman for Christ’s sake. He still hadn’t figured out how Dean had done it, and since it was one of the things the boys kept when they left, he couldn’t examine it. 

He kept turning pages. Sam with Dex up in one of the little beach shacks the guards used. One glance said the pair weren’t friends, but they weren’t enemies either. 

Surprisingly, Dex was as tall as Sam, just broader across the chest. If those two threw down on each other, they’d do some damage, so it was probably a good thing they had some kind of a truce. 

Dean with a blonde woman in a paramedic’s uniform, leaning on the bumper of their ambulance and chatting. 

Sam again, this time with Mitchell. Medical discharge from the Air Force in 1996, just enough of a vision problem after being hit in the eye with shrapnel that he couldn’t fly fighter jets anymore. Lived with his girlfriend - Vala Mal Doran - and his ninety seven year old grandmother Camille. 

The photo after that one was of Dean, assisting an elderly woman into the passenger seat of the Impala. For a ninety seven year old, Mrs. Mitchell looked awful spry, and she clearly appreciated the Chevy that was chauffeuring her wherever it was she was going.

Sam was the one most likely to do charity work, so he wondered why it was Dean doing the good deed. Mrs. Mitchell was a little…seasoned…to be a date, plus Dean…

He took another long drink of whiskey, wiping his mouth on his sleeve and flipping to the next page. 

Five seconds passed before he lifted the bottle back up and drank again. 

Sheppard was unlocking the door of a small house, with Dean standing inside his personal space and laughing. 

Dean rarely let anyone hear him belly laugh, and since the age of about eight, that anyone was pretty much exclusive to Sammy. 

Also? The almost lack of space between the pair on the porch? Yeah, unless it was literally fighting back to back, no one got inside Dean’s ‘zone’ except Sam, himself and maybe, just maybe Bobby. Even then, except for Sam, it was a quick hug and they were back to having five feet of space between them. 

The second…third…photo in the sleeve clinched it. Dated an hour and a half later than the one over top of it, both Dean and Sheppard were leaving the house, hair wet and wearing different clothes. There was a …content…look on Dean’s face too, softer than he was use to seeing on his son. 

He forced his eyes away from the pair of pictures to the one on the other side. 

Sam, with a man identified as Evan Lorne. The name he’d lost in the shuffle earlier. 

He flipped to Lorne’s report, and was surprised to learn that Olivia had known him years ago in college. Because of that, she was able to provide some personal details that wouldn’t be on a computer no matter how hard you looked. 

Only child of a hippie mother, raised as a Wiccan. Mother was ‘descended’ from the Buckland coven out of Long Island, and he knew that particular crowd couldn’t magic their way out of a wet paper bag. A bunch of nature worshippers calling themselves witches, not the real deal.

Olivia added some other stuff, mostly on Lorne’s education, then a paragraph jumped out at him. 

_‘Lorne’s mother, Bridget Thomas, use to hang around with R.C Adams. It’s how R.C and I met, but I couldn’t tell you if Ms. Bridget knew about us being hunters or not. He’s real closed mouthed on the subject, so you know all the things that could mean. I brought up old times before I sent this out. Had to get R.C stinking drunk before he’d throw me a bone._

He and Ms. Bridget were tight when Evan was a kid, lost touch for awhile after R.C moved east, started talking again while Evan was in college, then drifted apart. Before her funeral, R.C heard from her once or twice a year at most. He isn’t sure Evan would remember him. Hell, I’m not sure Evan would remember me either, but I thought you should know.’ 

Huhn. 

He let the thoughts roam around in his head without trying to put them in order, and took another swallow of whiskey. 

He flipped pages - Sam fooling around in what looked like an herb garden in front of a house that wasn’t Sheppard’s, with Lorne working a few feet away. Dean washing the Impala in the driveway of that same house, oblivious to a teenage girl staring at him from her yard. Checking the report, Olivia had identified the place as Lorne’s, and apparently where Sam and Dean lived during the summer. 

Sam and Sheppard working on a motorcycle together while Dean did something under the hood of a car with Lorne passing tools over to him. 

Sam, Lorne, Dean and Sheppard eating at a picnic table behind what Olivia said was Sheppard’s house. The picture’s quality was so good, and so close, that he could see Sam was laughing hard enough to have tears in his eyes.

He finished the whiskey, tossing the bottle at the trash more than into it, the closed both notebooks. 

He was about to throw everything back into the box when he noticed two CDs…or DVDs…tucked against the side where they were less likely to get broken. 

He reached for his laptop and slid the first disk inside. 

Windows Media opened immediately and began playing a street scene. Rhythmic clapping noises echoed from somewhere before the camera slid through a gap in a fence and displayed a small asphalt lot. 

Judging from the brickwork, and the people he could see standing on the sidelines, the lot was attached to the firehouse, maybe extra equipment storage or a training space. 

Dean was circling around, a pair of short wooden sticks in his hands. Mirroring him was Dex, and the clapping noises came as their weapons struck each other. 

The pair fought for a few seconds before moving back out of the camera’s range. Olivia must’ve been squashed against the fence to even get this much, and he appreciated it. 

When Dex moved back into the lens, Sam was after him, and Dean was battling Emmagen. They disappeared, and the camera jostled as Olivia attempted to get more footage. 

Emmagen was chasing Sheppard around now, and Sam was fighting against Mitchell with long staves instead of the escrimna sticks . 

They moved out of range again, but he could hear the weapons beating against each other. The people watching in the doorways weren’t what you’d call silent, but only bits of conversation were clear enough to hear. Jackson and Quinn, someone identified as Jonathan O’Neill, and a couple others Olivia didn’t name. 

She moved again, pulling the camera through the fence and down. He saw nothing but sidewalk for a few seconds, then she wedged herself into another spot and he got to see his sons again. 

Back to back, Dean now holding a long staff just like Sam’s, going up against Mitchell and Sheppard. Dex was getting back into uniform on the sidelines, and Emmagen was taking a drink from a water bottle, watching the fight. 

Laura Beckett appeared on Sam’s right, trying to take him off guard. Sheppard left his standoff with Dean to engage her. Dean turned his ‘fury’ on Mitchell, letting Sam escape. 

Something caught his attention and he forced the computer to rewind the scene. 

He watched again. 

Then again. 

Oh. 

The whole thing was choreographed, like a line dance. Just some … less than normal aerobic exercise during what was obviously Sam and Dex’s lunch break. Possibly Mitchell’s too, since he was sliding out of the fight as Emmagen stepped in and took Beckett on. 

Olivia kept the camera on Dean after Sam headed out, but after another five minutes or so, the exercise ended. Beckett and Emmagen saluted each other with their staves, likewise Dean and Sheppard. The file ended. 

The second file was just like the first, only the participants had changed. And it was less organized than he’d originally thought, more that when certain people appeared on the ‘field’ other people knew it was time to call things quits and go back to work. 

It wasn’t all staves and escrimna sticks either. The third file was strictly hand to hand, and while no one got hurt, no one really fought fairly either. 

Sam took the worst of his fight with Emmagen, clearly not wanting to hurt her, but he gave Beckett as good as he got. 

Dean didn’t have any hesitation, going after both women equal to the men. He bested Dex, probably because he was use to sparring against Sam and could avoid Dex’s greater reach, but had to call a draw on Sheppard and never got to go against Mitchell when an alarm sounded requiring a paramedic. 

The disk came to an end, so he picked up the second one and slid it in. 

The group at a Paintball arena was the first file. Red team - Dean’s - won, but Sam’s blue team made them work for it. 

The second file was of a church summer camp visiting the station. All the firefighters, paramedics and lifeguards were involved with the children, but Olivia did her best to stick with Dean, as Sam was apparently working on the beach. 

O’Neill, who he finally read was the Lieutenant in charge of the fire station, did the lectures on ‘stop, drop and roll’ and how to check a smoke detector before Dean stepped up and started a discussion on what to do when someone was sick. 

The little blonde paramedic looked like she’d dodged a bullet, but she was perfectly willing to play Dean’s assistant. 

Dean’s voice was clear, his tone of voice conversational instead of condescending or patronizing. He spoke with the kids, not at or to them. 

The older children weren’t bored, which was important, but the littlest ones were fascinated. Whenever Dean needed a volunteer for something, tiny hands flew into the air. 

He watched too, just as enthralled by his son as those kids were. He hadn’t thought about grandchildren since before Mary died, but Dean wasn’t hunting anymore, and California was one of those progressive states. One day there might be another youngster running around with the Winchester name. 

He wondered if he’d ever get to meet that unborn baby. 

The file ended with the summer camp counselors rounding up their charges and leaving. 

Next up was a volleyball game, the sun going down as they played, trash talking each other the entire time. 

Sam, Dean and Sheppard on one side with Emmagen. Beckett, Jackson, Mitchell and Dex on the other team. 

He continued to watch the disk; watch the easy camaraderie, how much his boys laughed and smiled. Dean’s confidence as he cared for a woman who crashed her bicycle, Sam’s as he handled a bunch of rowdy teenagers upsetting the other swimmers. 

He watched the disk until it ended, then watched it again. 

And in the morning, he packed everything up in it’s box, carried it to the woods, and burned it. 

Then he moved on. 

He had a demon to find.


	6. Make Your Heart Feel

The Fourth of July weekend proves to be … interesting.

Between accidents with barbeque grills and fireworks, and the insanity of some of the sun worshippers on the beach, there isn’t an idle body to be found anywhere in Engine 77. 

On Friday morning, the neighborhood church’s Bible camp takes a little field trip down to 77, to hear about, among other things, ‘stop, drop and roll.’

Jack runs that part; checking batteries in smoke detectors, getting low and staying low in a fire so you can keep breathing clean air, running fire drills so everyone knows how to get out of the house in an emergency. 

Jennifer’s supposed to take the medic side of the lecture, but healthy kids freak her out, so Dean steps up to the plate. 

Jack settles his ass on the ladder truck’s steps and watches the boy work. 

You’d think Dean practiced his line of patter, he’s so smooth, but nope. Just from Jennifer’s nervous flutters, he knows exactly what’s supposed to be taught, and puts his own spin on it. 

He mixes jokes into his lecture, stuff that flies over the heads of the littlest listeners while making the preteens smirk and laugh. Then he gets the youngest kids giggling as the older ones roll their eyes.

Jack considers getting up to ask the mother with the video camera for a copy of the tape. They need someone to do school safety lectures. 

Children gravitate to Dean like planets to a sun, and he shines for them. Today would make a great ‘audition’ for the Fire Department’s version of “Officer Friendly.”

There’s a sudden clamor and Jack blinks, belatedly realizing that the camp counselors are rounding up the kids so they can leave.

A couple of little tykes have run over to Dean, chattering a few more questions at him. He’s crouched easily on the floor, keeping an eye on the parents while answering. 

Jack stands when Sister Joan comes over to talk about tonight’s joint venture, losing track of the mother with the camcorder. 

After the quick conversation, he asks Sister how to find her, and is more than a little disturbed to learn that the ’mother’ was never part of the camp to begin with. 

~~~

Friday night there’s “Cinema on the Sand,” a free pair of movies shown on a projection screen set up in back of the firehouse. 

The surf bunnies scatter themselves throughout the crowd. Half of them are wearing their bright orange jackets, and others - like Sam - wearing jeans with their uniform shirts, being inconspicuous. 

Sister Joan and her group are selling popcorn, nachos and hot dogs, while the neighborhood Little League team sells sodas, bottled water and candy. They do a decent business, but some families opt to bring picnic dinners to “Ice Age” while some of the couples who come to “Independence Day” - ha ha - ate somewhere else. 

For the lifeguards, the night goes quietly and ends a little after eleven. For Dean, Jenn, John and the firefighters, the night sucks ass, starting with a three car collision and going down from there.

Sam’s gone home, slept, come back to work, and is taking his lunch break at the firehouse when he finally gets to see his brother again. Dean’s got a ham sandwich cut into four chunks for easier eating, and Sam resists the urge to steal one instead of digging out the leftover spaghetti he brought with him. 

He gets the sandwich anyway when Dean goes out on yet another call. 

~~~~

A pet store goes up in flames in the wee hours of Sunday morning. Peter, the dispatcher on duty, doesn’t need to say much to rally most of the arriving lifeguards into following the engines out and helping to save the trapped animals. 

The store’s sprinklers have managed to keep some of the poor things safe in the six minutes it takes to get there, but instead of a pounding spray, the system is closer to a piss trickle. Nowhere near enough to actually douse the blaze. 

Teyla leads the charge with the five man hose team through the back door and into the area where the fire started, while Jack gets in the front, organizing everyone else into lines to “chain gang” the cages to safety. 

Helpless with animals, Jenn’s on her cell phone, calling every twenty-four hour veterinarian in the book, warning them of incoming emergencies. 

While she’s doing that, Dean’s matching cars to lifeguards and loading up them, using the Rules of Triage to decide which rabbit goes over which puppy over which kitten. One Rottweiler has a jerry-rigged oxygen mask over his muzzle, and is stretched out in the back of Sam’s Mustang, with Cameron’s girlfriend Vala driving so Sam can keep ‘bagging’ the patient. 

They rescue as many as they can, but most of the birds and half the reptiles are already dead. There’s also no way to move the fish tanks that haven’t been damaged. Once the fire’s out, Jonas does his best to get the denizens of the deep into buckets, but no one’s very optimistic that they’ll make it after their water’s been polluted by god knows what. 

The local news crews make good time, but instead of the human interest piece the reporters were hoping for - tugging the heartstrings sells papers and makes ratings you know - they get a ten second blurb, some pictures of the smoking wreckage, and a story that’s barely five sentences long. 

Not even the eager tongue of the healthiest puppy in the pack can wipe away Jack’s smug look at his peoples’ effectiveness. 

~~~

Laura comes in around two in the afternoon, hot, filthy and ready to murder someone. She’d gone through the door with Teyla’s team and has been at the store every since, conducting an investigation into the cause of the fire. 

Her preliminary information is that the owner is either the stupidest bitch to ever walk the earth, or the fire was deliberately set and dressed up to look like an accident. She’s leaning towards the arson angle, given that the owner never showed their face, yet called the insurance company to come out and handle the claim first thing in the morning. 

The adjuster’s already written off all the animals under the care of the veterinarians, and no one knows whether they’ll get paid or not, since it wasn’t the owner who ‘hired’ them. 

Surprisingly, it’s Chuck who blows a fuse first, and Chuck who calls a friend, who calls another friend. 

By the end of the next day, the reporters Jack cheated have their story. The cast and crew of a locally filmed crime drama opened their wallets and donated the necessary money to pay for the continued care of the fire’s silent victims. 

~~~

Every four weeks, the Los Angeles County Fire Department requires the first aid kits and equipment to be inspected at each and every lifeguard’s shack. Jenn and Dean split the beach between them on July 10th, dropping off supplies and chatting with whoever’s on duty. 

Unlike the previous Saturday, this one is quiet, the sky heavily overcast with the promise of rain. Cameron’s sweeping the sand out of the little building he’s assigned, taking advantage of the empty stretch of ocean in front of him to do a bit of cleaning when Dean comes up. 

The inspection goes well and Dean’s about to leave when Cam asks if he’s got a second. He does, and soon learns that his friend finally grew a pair, popped the question, and got himself a fiancee. 

As she proved the morning of the pet store fire, Vala is one of the gang, even though she works for the police department. She’s also the only other person besides Sam to proudly own an official “Long Beach Engine 77” volunteer t-shirt. 

She wears it too, just like Sam, despite the fact that instead of actually reading ’Volunteer,’ the shirt says ‘House Elf.’ 

The nuptials are going to be in August, in Las Vegas, and there’s going to be an Elvis impersonator involved somehow. Dean’s not surprised to hear that, because he couldn’t picture a church wedding for Vala if he tried.

There hasn’t been news this good running around 77 in all the time Dean’s been bouncing in and out of it. 

~~~

Near the end of the month, one of the part timers calls in sick, aka hung-over, and instead of being on Rotation, Sam’s assigned to Tower 19.

It’s up to the individual guards whether to wear the white uniform shirt while on tower duty. It’s expected, however, that if you are wearing it, you’ll yank it off for safety’s sake before you go into the water on a rescue. Otherwise, a panicked swimmer could use it as a noose, and you’ll be in deep shit. 

Sam’s not particularly worried about skin cancer, and he didn’t inherit their mother’s pale complexion like Dean did, so he doesn’t think about it when, after wading into the water to grab a little boy, he forgets to put the shirt back on. 

Bad idea.

~~

Sam’s look of relief at sighting John has every alarm bell in the pilot’s head ringing. 

He scans the water first and doesn‘t see any problems. One look at the sand, and he can spot three. 

All female, all turning tower duty into a day on the meat rack. 

Marvelous. Just what he needed today.

Even though he’s not the least bit hungry, John bribes Sam into taking the truck and sneaking over to Java to pick up lunch for the both of them. 

Sneaking because, despite Sam’s lack of employment at the coffee shop, Jonesin’ 4 Java remains an Engine 77 favorite. It could be an hour before everyone logs their orders in if they knew Sam was headed there. 

The kid makes a clean getaway, and John settles on the far end of the railing to watch the water. 

The trio of problem children on the sand are pouting now. John gives them a less than friendly look over his sunglasses, hoping they’ll take offense, figure he’s there for good, and bug out. 

Christ does he hate it when he’s right. He knew this was going to be an issue when Cameron mentioned sticking Sam out here for eight straight.

You‘ve got to play a game when you deal with the public. Especially when your job requires you to be half naked around them. 

Cameron’s friendly and oblivious. People that are interested in him have to hit him over the head with a cluebat before he pulls an ‘Aw shucks, I’m taken.’

Ronon goes for mildly scary and completely disinterested. John once heard a girl describe Ronon as a tiger; gorgeous, but he’ll bite your hand off. 

Jonas, before he went for training on the Scarabs, geek babbled his admirers to death and still owed Laura for bailing him out the one time that was a bigger turn on. It was said that Daniel, who originated the stunt, had lost count of how many times he’d been rescued. 

John’s way of doing things was to make himself into a constantly moving target. It wasn’t a foolproof plan, but it was better than nothing and the rare times it didn’t work could be counted on one hand with fingers left over. 

That was the tactic Sam needed to use, however it was impossible when idiots didn’t take their jobs seriously and actually come in to do them. 

He shot the blanket brigade another look, gauging his progress with getting them to move on. They were indeed packing up, at a fairly decent pace too, so assuming Java was on the busy side; they should be long gone before Sam got back. 

Thank God. It would be great if any of them had a brain cell between them, enough to figure out that they needed to act their ages when they flirted, but no. They thought it was cute to giggle and stare like eleven year olds with a Playgirl, oblivious to the discomfort they were causing. 

John resisted the urge to grind his teeth. If he ever got his hands on the mindfucking asswipe that raised Dean and Sam again, he’d kill the bastard. 

There was shy, and then there was spooked wild animal, which is exactly what that paranoid sonovabitch had turned the boys into. Sam especially was a walking Sith mantra. Corner him long enough and shyness - fear by another name - would turn to anger, then to hate, and then he’d open a can of whup ass on you, which would cause you to suffer. Hi Darkside, want a cookie?

John shot a glance to his right and found that the three gigglers were heading down the beach towards Tower 20. Yippee, they were now Markham’s problem. 

He focused on the water again, pushed his sunglasses up and tiredly rubbed at his eyes, trying to get rid of his bad mood. 

It had been brewing all day. Holland was talking about leaving Life Flight for a private company that would pay more and have stable hours. 

It would leave a hole in John’s team, one with Dean’s name on it, but there was no way he’d leave Sam up north by himself for nine months out of the year. 

Besides, who even knew that Sam would go to Stanford Law next fall? He might get offered a godforsaken spot at Harvard back east, and thanks to good old Daddy Dearest, the boys were so codependent that where Sam went, Dean would follow. 

Every city, county and state in America needed paramedics for Christ’s sake, wasn’t that flexibility how he himself had convinced Dean to take the goddamned EMT job in the first place?

John ground his teeth some more. He knew it was irrational to be so possessive and protective of two kids he hadn’t even known five years ago, but damn it, he couldn’t help it. 

His brother’s progeny hadn’t stirred anything in him but the desire to get as far away as he possibly could as fast as he possibly could. Every time his - now ex - wife had talked about having a baby, he’d barely resisted the urge to get a vasectomy done. 

Maybe he was getting old. Maybe it was because Dean and Sam weren’t infants, but falling into a paternal role with them was ridiculously easy. 

It had started with the strange feeling of déjà vu when he first met Dean. When he’d been introduced to and had gotten to know Sam, the urge to look after the boys had gotten that much stronger.

Putting the caduceus around Dean’s neck felt like passing down a family heirloom. My son had echoed through his mind like a heartbeat. 

Learning Sam had a full ride to Stanford, his old alma mater, made him wanna do a Travolta style strut. Look at him, ain’t he a chip off the block?

He hadn’t celebrated Christmas in years, preferring to be on assignment even while he was married. He thought it was just Sam’s holiday happiness rubbing off, but it wasn’t. Buying a tree and decorations, putting them up…felt like a circle closing. Like a hug if he wanted to be all mushy about it. 

And if he was being irrational now, it was nothing compared to how he felt getting that call from Karen about her having to fly an injured Dean to the hospital. If Steven hadn’t been there, hadn’t taken a stand beside him and calmed him down, he would’ve left Life Flight without a second thought. 

For someone he hadn’t known a year at that point, he’d been ready to give up flying. 

He was self aware enough to recognize that it was the same form of insanity that made him content himself with one punch when Jarhead showed up at Dean’s firehouse after Paramedic Blake’s funeral.

Sam might not care, but Dean still loved his father and it would hurt him to know the man wasn’t in the world anymore. 

Despite raising the boys so that they only felt safe sleeping with each other. Despite never showing up at Dean’s side when the kid was laying in a hospital bed and the doctors were worried about complications from being hit by a fucking car, Dean still cared about the man.

Mother Nature had been damn generous when she’d made Dean’s heart. Way more than she’d been when she’d made his own.

John rubbed at his eyes again, hearing the sound of tires on sand that heralded Sam’s return with lunch. 

They talked while Sam ate a tuna wrap and John drank his cappuccino, still not interested in food. 

Sam’s sly question about ‘saving room’ caught him off guard, and he had to search his memory before he realized what the kid was talking about. 

Dinner. With the boys and Evan. Tonight. 

Oh shit. 

John’s bad mood lifted up for a split second with sheer panic, then slammed down again. Evan Lorne was a whole different set of problems, and he wasn’t anymore prepared to deal with them than he was with the whole work mess. 

And unfortunately, thinking about Evan tied nicely back into the stuff John was trying not to think about in the first place. 

Damn it. 

After John had threatened to quit in order to watch over Dean at the hospital, he’d been allowed three days’ emergency leave. He shouldn’t have had to fight for time off, but Life Flight had been short handed, and taking John off the list of remaining pilots had been an inconvenience to the man in charge. 

Evan, however, worked from home, so when John’s job had forced him to leave San Jose, Evan stayed until Dean had recovered enough to go back to work. 

The least John could do, stuck in Long Beach, was baby-sit Evan’s house. He cleaned out the perishables, brought the mail in, ran the lawnmower over the grass once or twice. 

When he picked Evan up at the airport, that’s when trouble started. 

Evan didn’t feel like cooking for himself, so they went to dinner. John picked the place just because he hadn’t had Italian in a good long while and Evan didn’t care as long as it was food.

Settled at a table in the Olive Garden, John got to hear the story of Sam’s graduation dinner. The rest of the evening went by as he and Evan talked, mostly about the boys, occasionally about themselves. 

Trading information on ‘their kids’ happened once or twice a month after that. John would call Evan or vice versa and they’d go out, grab a bite to eat. 

The boys came home for the summer, and clearly thought that going to baseball games without John and Evan along was weird. Dean started it, winning four tickets to an Angel’s game. John picked up tickets for the next night during the seventh inning stretch, and after that game, Evan was the one to hit the ticket office. 

Sam decided he wanted to see a Galaxy soccer match while the Angels were out of town. John and Evan might’ve been asked to go to help keep Dean awake, but it had been a good time anyway. 

In the fall, the Angels deciding to wild card themselves into the World Series for the first time ever kept the foursome from breaking up.

Despite the boys being in San Jose just as things were getting interesting, either John or Evan would host the other, watching the games on TV with Dean and Sam on a speakerphone. 

The phone trend finished out the baseball season and continued through football season. Aside from the sports, Evan and John kept finding excuses to spend time together, but in three years, they never crossed the line to lovers, even though they had a few near misses and occasionally joked about it. 

John found out why last November, when the hospital called.

The police met him there, and only the fact that John had been at 77 watching “Back to the Future” with the gang kept him from being a suspect in Evan’s assault. 

From Evan’s reluctance to ‘talk‘, the cops figured on a domestic dispute. Finding John’s number in Evan’s wallet gave them a badly needed clue that turned up bupkis. 

When the police finally let him go back to Evan’s cubicle, John had expected to see the black eye, the bloody nose. He hadn’t expected the broken jaw or the doctor trying to convince Evan to allow a rape kit and to press charges against the man who hurt him. 

John got the entire story after he helped Evan lie to the boys about why he wouldn’t be going north for the annual Thanksgiving feast and didn’t want them to come home. 

In debt after his mother died, Evan slept with her oncologist for money. While he might not call the man a bastard, John sure did, because the Doc pimped Evan out to his friends. 

For some reason or another, even after the oncologist moved away and he didn’t need the income anymore, Evan kept up ‘the business’. He kept saying that by then, it was about the sex, but John didn’t believe him. 

Either way, the original pool of clients mostly dried up, with only one or two who hung on, plus a few that Evan picked up on his own from some club downtown. 

The guy who assaulted Evan was one of the former, who’d been paying him for what was supposed to be mild bondage and submission. 

The problem was that the asshole had been drinking and Evan didn’t leave right away. When the client couldn’t get off, he blamed Evan, started smacking him around. The cuffs they were using held for a little bit before Evan got loose and fought back. 

That’s when his jaw was broken and he lost consciousness. When he came to, the other man had left. Evan repeatedly refused to press charges, and nothing John could say or do would get him to tell anyone the guy’s name. 

His secret out, Evan didn’t want to see John much, but Sam coming down in March for lifeguard training pushed them together. 

When they put Sam on the plane to go back to San Jose, the tension came to a boil. 

That’s when John found out that Evan was still seeing ’clients,’ despite promising John that he wouldn’t. 

That one of them was Ronon didn’t make things any better. In fact, it pretty much made them worse. The younger guy was one of John’s closest friends, and it grated on John’s nerves that Evan hadn’t found a way to either stop seeing him or - since Evan claimed to really like Ronon - to take the money out of the sex.

You know, try to have an actual relationship with the guy?

It took a couple of weeks and one more hellacious argument before they’d called a truce for the sake of their kids. Thing was, it was unbelievably awkward being around one another with the subject hanging over their heads like the Sword of Damocles. 

The boys knew something was up. Dean had tried to talk to John about it, but Sam was content to believe that it was Unresolved Sexual Tension. Hell, he was thrilled with the idea of his ‘two favorite people’ getting together. 

The radio brought John out of his thoughts with a jolt, Stackhouse at Tower 18 was requesting backup and a paramedic unit. 

~~~

Stackhouse’s call had been for a little girl who’d been stung by a bee. Turned out the toddler was allergic, and only some quick action with an Epipen from the first aid kit kept her going long enough for Dean and Jenn to get there. She was in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit until the risk of a secondary reaction had passed. 

John sent Stacks back to headquarters to do up the paperwork, staying at 18 until the beach closed. Sam met him there and after they returned the rescue truck to its nighttime parking spot, they headed for home. 

Dinner that night is quiet and it ends early. 

~~~

By mutual decision, the puppy Sam drove to the vet comes home the last day of July. 

His first act is to demonstrate his contempt for the free press by tearing apart the August issue of “The Advocate.” 

Then he pees on it. 

Of all the names Evan calls him that day, Rumsfeld is the one that sticks.


	7. Remember Me

(August 2004)

The middle of the week is actually the easiest and best time for Cameron and Vala’s friends to take off work and boogie over to Las Vegas for the wedding. 

Those who’ve selflessly - or wisely - decided to stay home and ‘mind the store’ hold the bridal shower and bachelor party the first Thursday in August. The following Monday, the road trip to Sin City begins. 

~~~

Including the bride and groom, it’s less than two dozen people, and women are scarce. Vala, her maid of honor Samantha, ‘flower doctor’ Janet, Laura, Grammie and Jack’s date Elizabeth, that’s it for estrogen. 

The ’reception’ is just finding a decent restaurant with a good band and dancing. Vala manages to drag Ronon onto the floor once, snags Sam twice, and fails utterly at getting John out there. Grammie scores that coup when someone requests Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade,” one of her favorites. She and John sway together for maybe thirty seconds, then Ronon gently cuts in. 

The four and a half minute song is all Grammie can handle, so each of her ‘grandsons’ takes a turn. Dean steps in after Ronon, then Sam, Daniel and Vala’s partner Teal’c, who bows as he places Grammie’s hand in Cameron’s for the last minute or so. Carson and Jack stayed with their ladies, Jonas was dancing with Samantha. Teal’c went to Janet and Daniel spun Vala around in Cam’s absence. 

It’s a very, very good thing that everyone is camera happy and gets plenty of pictures. 

Two weeks after the wedding, Dean and Sam are just outside Santa Barbara, driving back to San Jose for Sam’s last year of college when they get the calls; John for Dean, Daniel for Sam. 

Camille Mitchell passed quietly away in her sleep at the age of ninety seven. 

~~~

The viewing is hell. 

Ever dutiful, Cameron called his aunts, uncles and cousins, letting them know what happened. 

Grammie planned her funeral herself and it was already paid for when she died. Despite being told that she wanted things done this way, her children are chocked full of criticism. 

Rather than the stiff, formal dress clothes everyone usually chooses, Grammie’s wearing the Maxine™ sweatshirt Sam and Dean gave her last Christmas, a pair of khaki ‘leisure’ pants, sweat socks and her favorite sneakers. 

Her cross was a present from Jonas. The earrings she bought on a shopping trip with Laura and the ‘enormously ugly’ watch on her wrist? She won it from John in a poker game. 

Daniel gave her the Bible she’s holding and her rosary isn’t the fancy family heirloom that two of Cameron’s aunts are ‘worried‘ about. It’s one Ronon made for her out of seashells. 

None of these memories matter to her blood kin, who only complain about how inappropriate everything is. 

As if they’ve got a right to say anything. None of them have seen the woman since before she moved in with Cameron, and that‘s been almost ten years now. 

Daniel nearly comes to blows with one of the sons when the man calls Jack a gigolo, an assumption made when he spotted a picture of Jack and Grammie dancing at a Widows and Orphans Fundraiser. Vala gets Daniel away before he does something stupid, then turns back and slaps the sneer right off the guy’s face. 

She’s still calling him every filthy name in the book as Sam and Samantha drag her back to her husband’s side. 

~~~

There’s a single Mass of Christian Burial in the morning, where everyone is on their best behavior, but there are two separate ‘interments.’

Grammie’s sons and daughters, along with their families, leave almost immediately to take half her ashes back to Kansas. She requested they be scattered over the grave of her late husband. 

The other urn goes with Cameron to 77’s hall, where it’s given a place of honor as everyone shares their best memories. 

Laura unashamedly sings “I Will Follow Him” from Sister Act, getting Vala to join her. 

When Cameron’s voice breaks during Grammie’s preferred version of “Amazing Grace” - the one in the Cherokee language - it’s Dean who surprises the entire group by finishing the song in a clear, powerful baritone. 

He never got to say goodbye to or honor the only other woman who ever made him a birthday cake. He’s gonna damn sure do it for Grammie, even if his head explodes from embarrassment. 

~~~

Just before sundown, with the beach closed and all but empty, those who loved Grammie best from Engine 77 - plus Samantha, Janet, Teal’c, Elizabeth and Carson - go out into the ocean on surfboards. They scatter leis of white flowers as Cameron sinks the clay urn. It’s a small thing, but it’s one that sealife can turn into a tiny bit of reef. 

Since Father Paul can’t swim, Jack is the one who recites the prayer over the ‘gravesite,’ modifying the one the Navy use to use for burials at sea. Even though Grammie would’ve appreciated him cracking a joke about an ex-Air Force Colonel saying such a thing, he can’t bring himself to do it. 

The ‘amens’ are said by those so inclined, Teyla quietly sings “Aloha ‘Oe” to end the service. 

Not another word is spoken as everyone paddles back to shore and heads home.


	8. One of the Chosen Ones

Halfway through September, Cameron turns up on Dean and Sam’s doorstep in San Jose, marking the very first time he’s ever visited. 

John gave him directions, had offered to accompany him, but Cam wanted to do it alone. 

Sam calls Dean at work, getting him to take a couple hours’ personal time so Cameron doesn’t have to spend the night. Michelle’s come in to get something from her locker, and she offers to ride out on any emergency while Dean’s gone. 

Cameron looks tired, his eyes shadowed. There’s a duffel bag sitting next to him that’s the reason he flew up here. 

Grammie‘s Last Will and Testament has been read, he tells them, and they were both beneficiaries of it. 

Dean and Sam exchange a confused look, and he resists the urge to bang their heads together. He knew this was going to happen. 

Patiently, Cameron reminds them of the Mitchell family drama they had front row seats for just a few weeks ago. Then he explains how it all began when Grampa Mitchell died and Grammie was alone for the first time in her life. 

Her children were off doing their own things, her friends were dying one by one, and she spent herself into debt because the QVC operators would talk to her when she ordered stuff from them. 

Same thing with telephone psychics who charged $4.95 a minute for Grammie to chat with her departed loved ones.

Instead of paying attention to her, her children locked her in a nursing home, intending on selling her house and dividing up everything in it. 

Jack’s wife Sarah was the one to call Cameron about the whole situation, enabling him to get a lawyer involved to look out for Grammie’s best interests and block the ‘looting’ of Grammie’s estate. It was the best he could do, he confesses, because he had just signed up for another tour of duty with the Air Force. 

A touch over two years later, shrapnel had ended his career and he was given a medical discharge. He sprung Grammie from the nursing home, moving lock, stock and barrel out to California, where Jack was holding a position with the Fire Department open for him. 

He never stopped his family from calling or visiting, but they never heard from anyone unless it was about money. 

Cameron pauses there, asks for a glass of water, forestalling the question he can see Sam about to ask: What does this have to do with us? 

Ronon had asked the same thing. Daniel hadn’t needed to and neither had John. 

He swallows some of the iced tea Sam gives him and feels like he’s been here for days. After Sam settles himself back down, Cameron continues. 

They’ve seen for themselves what 77 is like, so he doesn’t need to explain that. Most of it is Jack’s fault, what with his patented inability to keep his nose out of other people’s business. 

He bugged and nudged until Daniel and Cameron were friendly to each other, then introduced Daniel to Grammie. 

She adopted him on the spot. 

Next was John, who held out an amazing length of time before he realized she wasn’t going anywhere and gave in to her fussing. 

One by one, Grammie found people or Jack found people and gave them to her. She heard more from her collection of misfits than she ever did from her own flesh and blood. 

Three summers ago, she’d added the Winchester brothers, and they hadn’t disappointed her. 

Vala wasn’t the only one who use to give Grammie naughty novels. There’s a nice new stack sitting by the TV, with every single one of them bearing a fifty cent price tag and a stamp on it from “A Memorable Memoir” resale shop in Palo Alto. 

Sam flushes at that, but Dean’s too intent on what Cameron‘s saying to acknowledge that he knew his little brother was a freak. 

There’s also the matter of the Stanford mug Grammie liked to drink her coffee out of every morning since she got the thing. The one that matched her favorite sweatshirt and favorite gardening hat. 

Speaking of gardening, don’t forget that last summer, someone replanted all her flowers in the middle of the night after the new neighbor’s dog tore them apart. 

Before the Winchesters can say a word - because that wasn’t their idea, they just helped - Cameron talks about the Christmas cards and silly little postcards with San Jose stamped on them. About coming home and hearing “Samuel says hi!!” when he walked in the front door. 

Grammie’s only known two Samuels in her entire life. One’s been dead for thirty years and the other one is still breathing. Since the phone bill isn’t through the roof, she had to have been talking about the 2.0 version. 

They may’ve seen what they did as being nice to her, or being polite, but Grammie considered them as much her grandchildren as Cameron is. 

The Winchesters are silent, and Cameron’s eyes are wet as he informs them that he has no intention of letting anyone stop him from carrying out Grammie’s final requests, so they’d better just shut up, take what she wanted them to have and say a few prayers for her. 

He swipes at his face, asks where the bathroom is. Dean points it out, and Cam goes down the hall to pull himself together again. 

When he gets back, they get down to the contents of the duffel. 

It’s mostly stuff for Sam. Dean’s inheritance will need to be collected from Long Beach when there’s time.

See, even though Sam was the one who always asked for recipes, Grammie knew they were for Dean’s sometimes finicky appetite. So he gets all of Grammie’s cookbooks, with the provision that he shares them if Cameron comes asking. 

There’s stuff in her collection dating back to the Colonials, Cam informs Dean, and Daniel would love to help if Dean ever wants to do anything special with it. He - Daniel - inherited the journals, letters and assorted paperwork that went with those recipes, being the group’s history buff. 

Here and now though, Cameron’s got Grammie’s main cookbook with him. It‘s a battered, beaten up thing that greatly resembles John Winchester’s journal, and Dean’s a little weirded out until he opens it. The front page is faded almost illegible, but Sam’s copy is stuck to the refrigerator, because they were going to have Grammie’s Goulash for dinner tomorrow. 

Cam sees Dean’s flinch and nods, saying only “Meatloaf. Last night.” 

It’s Sam’s turn to wince then, because he fixes meatloaf when he’s studying for finals. Put a nice, thick slab of it between two slices of bread and he’s a happy camper. Those sandwiches, his friend Jessica swears, are responsible for his high scores, and every year, she threatens to steal them from him. 

The trio sit in silence for a few minutes, but Cameron remembers that Dean’s got to go back to the firehouse sometime tonight and reaches into the duffel bag again, drawing out a jewelry box. 

Anyway, it’s best to get the next part over with as quick as possible, like yanking a Band-aid. 

He passes the wooden container to Sam, whose eyes widen in shock when he opens it. 

Grammie resolved herself years ago to the fact that Cameron had his own way of worshipping God, and that Vala didn’t believe at all. 

Of those she held close to her heart this last decade, Sam’s the only one who went to Mass with her, so he gets her cross, the St. Eustachius medal it shares a chain with, and her family’s rosary. Cameron also hands him a small stack of Grammie’s old Bibles, the ones she’d underlined and scribbled in and generally made a mess of when she was Sam’s age and younger. 

She’d had a lot of questions for her first priest, and wrote his answers down for future reference. That Sam might find comfort in them was her reason for passing the Bibles to him rather than asking they be placed in her casket for burning.

The jewelry and rosary are worth a little money, maybe more than Cameron thinks with the price of gold going up, and despite everything said earlier, Sam tries to give them back. 

Now completely understanding John’s occasional frustrations regarding his adopted sons, Cameron simply gets up, takes Grammie’s treasured necklace out of the box and fastens it around Sam’s throat before tucking the charms under his shirt. 

John had done similar when he gave Dean the caduceus he constantly wore. And just like big brother had, Sam immediately fishes the necklace back out and holds it in his fist for a few moments, like he‘s making sure it’s real. 

Sam finally lets the pendant fall back against his shirt and gently shuts the rosary in the jewelry box before pulling it into his lap. Cameron nodded in satisfaction. 

What’s left in the duffel have no real meaning, just Grammie cleaning out her lifetime’s worth of things and sending them to good homes. A lovely three piece pearl jewelry set goes to Dean, for eventual gifting to his future wife.

Cameron has to grin sheepishly at that, but maybe, you know, Dean might find a special lady to wear them, even if she’s more a sister than a sweetheart. 

Sam smirks, but it’s Dean’s turn a second later when Cameron gives Sam a necklace, bracelet and earring trio, this set made with blue topaz. 

Two dainty rings - not engagement types, but excellent gifts for future daughters - and two tie clip/cuff links sets finish off what Cameron brought with him. 

Dean is just about squirming, looking at the feminine ornaments, and he asks if Vala would want them. Cameron hides his grin and shakes his head - Grammie asked Vala years ago about them and she turned them down. Anything jade went to her and she’s happy with that. 

Laura and Samantha, Janet and Elizabeth got stuff too, so there’s no point in asking them either. 

Oh, and Daniel got stuck with tons just because it was really old or from Good Eagle - Grammie’s Cherokee friend - so don’t pester him if you don’t want him to punch you. 

They have a small laugh at Dr. Jackson’s expense, then Dean’s watch beeping breaks the group up. He’s been away almost three hours instead of the two he’d asked for and he’s got to get back to work. Putting Grammie’s cookbook down for the first time since it was handed to him, Dean gives Cameron a quick hug when he says thank you. 

An hour later, when Cameron leaves for the airport, Sam does the same. 

It’s a family thing. 

~~~

Dean’s carrying a mug of coffee over to the kitchen table when pain slams through his head like a bolt of lightning. 

He reels, mug shattering to the floor as his hands come up to clutch his temples. 

His vision skewers, goes black, then starts spinning blue. 

A roar fills his ears, almost like voices that he can’t make out. 

His stomach drops down into his feet, the pain rips through his skull again, then…

It’s over. 

~~~

Thirty minutes away, in the Stanford University student union, Jessica cradles Sam against her chest, her napkin filled hand against his bleeding nose, trying to staunch the flow. 

He’d complained of a sudden headache, tried to get up for some water and dropped, white faced, to his knees, clutching his temples, breathless with pain. 

The date is 11-02-04. 

It is the twenty first anniversary of Mary Winchester’s death.


	9. Drew First Blood

The pain in Dean's head receded, his eyesight coming back in stages. He could feel the heat and wetness of his spilled coffee seeping into the knees of his pants.

The roaring voices had been replaced by one he recognized as a coworker. He just couldn't remember who.

Lincoln, his muddled mind finally coughed up. It's Lincoln.

The Fire Apparatus Operator dragged Dean to his feet, pushing him into a chair and kneeling in front of him. Still trying to figure out 'What the Hell', Dean submitted to the brief exam of his eyes and cognitive functions. He tried to stop Lincoln from going to grab the blood pressure monitor and the glucose tester from the ambulance, but failed miserably.

Fortunately, no one notices the quick checks. Pressure's in the mid-range of normal, although considering Dean's in pain, it was probably elevated by the adrenal response.

Sugar's way low, and Lincoln's a tad annoyed when Dean confesses that he hasn't eaten anything since sometime yesterday afternoon.

His expression thunderous, Lincoln yanks his breakfast out of the microwave and sets it on the table. If Dean doesn't make at least half of what's on the plate disappear, he's going to the lieutenant.

Muttering, Dean eats the scrambled eggs as quick as he can, finishing before Lincoln's done cleaning up the coffee and shattered ceramic mug from the floor.

Lincoln reluctantly sticks to the deal, accepting Dean's self-diagnosis of a sudden onset migraine with complications from hypoglycemia. He hands over a couple of Aleve and a glass of orange juice before turning Dean loose.

Third shift is nicely settled in by now, the boys - and girl - from second only hanging around to shoot the shit. Not counting changing out of his coffee soaked pants, there's nothing else Dean needs to do before he can leave.

Which is a good thing, considering that some dude named Zach calls from Stanford right as Dean sits down on the locker room bench to tie his shoes.

~~~~

Sam is beyond pissed that Jessica and Becky ignored his wishes and dragged him over here, but he can kinda, sorta, if he looks at it sideways, maybe understand why they did it. After all, his brain was apparently trying to leak out of his nose and his vision is still screwy.

He hears Zach in the clinic's hallway, reporting to his sister and Jess that he "got a hold of Sam's brother, I hope" and that "the guy's on his way."

Sam feels around in his pockets, discovers his cell phone missing and forgets that his head hurts. He yells for Zach to stop playing stickyfingers.

Zach passes the Treo over willingly, even being nice enough to ignore Sam's renewed temple clutching as he pays for raising his voice.

The doctor, when he finally comes in, seems like a decent guy when you take away the attitude that says Sam's a party boy with a hangover.

Dean, with impeccable timing, saves the doctor from Becky's indignant defense of Sam, only to turn around and flay the poor bastard himself.

Not just for Sam. Dean offhandedly throws in for several other patients as well.

He never raises his voice or uses profanity, yet the doctor's missing some serious strips of skin off his ego by the time Dean calls the place Doogie Howser's Playclinic.

It only takes three minutes after that for Sam to be released.

~~~~

Lincoln had given Dean a ride up to the campus so Dean would be able to bring Sam's Lady home instead of leaving her in the parking lot. After he had his little brother settled in their apartment, it didn't take a half hour to jog back down to the station to pick up his own Baby.

Not that he'd felt up to the jogging, but the activity, like driving now, forced him to focus on something other than the...whatever that was in the kitchen this morning.

It hadn't escaped his notice that Sammy had a migraine at almost the same time he did, but he was trying not to think about that too much either.

Just another item to add to a list that started with today being the anniversary of their mother's death.

Dean was briefly tempted to explain things as some kind of hysteria over the events of twenty one years ago, except Sam didn't remember Mom. He didn't need to indulge in any of the various coping mechanisms their father or Dean came up with to survive the day because, quite frankly, he didn't give a damn about Mary Winchester.

So there went that theory off the whiteboard.

The part of Dean's brain that has been memorizing medical textbooks for the last four years kept insisting - in the voice of Hawkeye Pierce no less - that Dean ask Sam "when you got your headache, did you have some kind of a vision?"

If Sam didn't, Dean was going nuts and was definitely overdue for a visit to the Funny Farm.

If Sam did have a vision to go with his headache, it was time to call Shirley Maclaine and freak the fuck out.

That's when Dean's phone rang.

And November second got a whole, new, suck ass reason to be memorable.

~~~~

You don’t get to be the go to guru for every hunter in the lower forty-eight by being ignorant of what was going on around you.

He couldn’t do half the things with a computer that Miles Ashland could do, but he wasn’t living in the Dark Ages either, thank you very much.

Robert Stephen Singer, known to the world as Bobby, had subscribed to every on-line newspaper in California shortly after he'd learned that Dean and Sam were living in the state. He also kept an eye on the websites for the major TV networks for Los Angeles and San Jose.

Somewhere in the neighborhood of two pm South Dakota time, the L.A. websites light up like it's Christmas with news of a medevac helicopter crash in San Bernardino County.

Not that Bobby was watching obsessively or anything. Its that the Winchester brothers had been on his mind for a few days, the timing coinciding with their father's appearance on his doorstep.

Use to be John would drink himself into a stupor wherever he happened to be on the day he lost his wife. Last three years, he'd holed up with Daniel Elkins in Colorado. This year, he'd come to Bobby.

It had nothing to do with the fact Dean and Sam had kept contact with Bobby. No, really, it didn't. It was all because of the library.

A library John was currently ignoring in favor of making repairs on his truck. He'd hit a deer on the way back from a whiskey run, messed the hood up some.

The smell of roasting meat was turning Bobby's stomach now, his hunter's instincts growling at him to get on the phone and call the boys. Check on them and that pilot friend of theirs.

The one that Sam, last time he'd spoken to Bobby, had unconsciously called Dad.

Bobby knew John and Sam had gotten into some hellacious fights before the kids left, but until four years ago Thanksgiving, he'd never known that Sam would happily dance on John's grave at the first opportunity.

The vitriol that rolled off the youngest Winchester when he thought his father had arranged for the car Bobby was gifting him with...Bobby wouldn't soon forget it.

In fact, that memory was one reason why he kept his mouth shut about the goings on in California for as long as he did. No point in stirring up trouble if he didn't have to.

At five o'clock that afternoon - South Dakota time of course - the websites reported it was an L.A. County Fire Department Air Rescue helicopter. Worse, its call sign was Life Flight Alpha.

Five minutes later, Bobby called the number Dean had given him for his Long Beach station-house. The shaken dispatcher on the other end told him, yeah, Sheppard was on board the bird that went down.

At half past five, one of the news sites posted a cellphone video of the crash that put paid on the decision of whether or not to tell John what was going on.

The smoke from the chopper's engine was moving against the breeze.

~~~~

Patrick and David Sheppard, John's father and older brother respectively, arrive at the Edward G. Hirschman Burn Center inside of Arrowhead Regional roughly three hours after the identities of the crash victims were released to the media.

They're met full on by an irate Jack O'Neill and every member of Engine 77 that could be spared from duty.

Things are heading into bloodbath territory within minutes. The nurses haven't just called for Security, they've got a janitor standing by to clean up the wreckage.

Jack's hated Patrick since the instant The Prick tossed teenaged John out on the street for not wanting to be a corporate drone like the rest of the family.

Patrick's hated Jack ever since he learned who it was took John off those streets before he could crawl back to the hive to beg forgiveness.

When he finds out Jack has John's medical proxy, Patrick threatens lawyers and all sorts of legal mumbo jumbo.

Jack smiles, playing his trump card. Patrick can take him to court all he wants. Jack will get to relax, drink a cold beer and watch Patrick's grandsons tear him to shreds.

Conveniently, Jack forgot to add the word 'adopted' to the sentence. It gives him an admittedly sick little thrill to fuck with Patrick's mind.

There's a frozen instant, like someone hit the pause button on the DVD player of Life, as the Sheppards absorb the information.

The nurses are watching the unfolding drama like it's Days of Our Lives. The equally interested janitor takes another bite of his candy bar while letting the security guards pass by.

There should be music playing as David firmly states that John doesn't have children.

"Been twenty years," Jack answers lightly. "How the hell do you know what he's got?"

Yep, the moment needs a tune...something dramatic and composed by Christopher Lennertz.

Especially as Dean steps into the lounge.

Dean's green-hazel eyes have never looked more like John's than they do right this minute, Jack ponders cheerfully. Once you get a gander at those peepers, it's easy to 'see' John's full lips and sharp cheekbones as well. The nose and chin don't match up on Dean, but when Sam follows his brother into the waiting area...

Yahtzee.

Patrick startles, blinking at the two young men. David needs to shut his mouth before he starts catching flies.

Dean takes in the tableau and, without a moment's hesitation, tells Security to escort the Sheppards out.

They automatically protest, but the rent-a-cops are more concerned with the damage that seven lifeguards, five firefighters, four detectives, two paramedics, and a doctor in a pear tree could do to the place if they get pissed.

That's not counting the mess Jack could make thanks to the legal papers he's carrying around either. Security hedges their bets, surrounding Patrick and David.

There's a few more mentions of lawyers, some mutterings about blood tests and court orders. Carson Beckett, who's been sitting quietly next to Laura, asks for an address. He'll have his receptionist send the D.N.A results right over.

Well I'll be damned, Jack thinks to himself after a nanosecond's worth of utter confusion, John got the kids tested after all.

Most of 77 gapes at the news. Carson shrugs apologetically, softly explaining. "He asked me not to tell."

The elder Sheppards went still as Carson spoke. David was reaching for the inner pocket of his suit, probably to give the good doctor a reachable address, when Patrick laid his hand on his son's arm.

He silently stares at Dean and Sam. His face remains impassive, but his eyes...

Something's broken in there that'll never be fixed.

Patrick looks at Jack, saying three words before swiftly turning and walking into the elevator.

"Congratulations. You've won."

~~~~

With a nod and a smile for the sexy little nurse at the desk, the janitor grabs the trashcan from beside her shapely leg and empties it into his cart.

It's not his usual gig, but it definitely had some perks. The luscious California scenery, getting to stick it to John's pompous paternal putz...

Hell, just that last thing would keep him entertained for months. He hadn't even needed to do much, merely tweaked perceptions, twisted a few memories, and made sure that Scottish doctor mentioned Sam's little genetic switcheroo.

The wrong last name written on a bagged and tested piece of blood stained gauze, and voila, instant new daddy.

He could not have set that up better if he'd personally planted the idea in Sam's enormous brain.

Oh wait. He had.

The janitor idly wondered if Patty had figured out that the ache in his chest was the same one he'd dished out forty-five years ago.

The son does to the father what the father did as a son.

He grinned to himself, popped the trashcan back into its spot, and moved on down the hall.

Who knew keeping a promise would be so much fun?


	10. A Fight I Could Not See

Chapter Nine : A Fight I Could Not See

After spending most of his time either on a plane or on a layover, Evan Lorne arrives at the burn center a hair before midnight.

The guy he met last Thanksgiving, Dr. Jackson - Daniel - tells him that the boys are down at John's window and should be back in a few minutes.

As he settles onto a couch, Evan passes Daniel a cup of coffee, fresh from the cafeteria, then pops the lid off his own.

He doesn't want it, but knows damn straight well he's gonna need the caffeine and sugar to push him through until he can persuade Dean and Sam to leave their vigil, go somewhere and rest.

The caramel flavored liquid slides smoothly down his throat as he swallows, trying to wrap his mind around the day.

Life Flight Alpha had been dispatched to an auto accident in the Hollywood Hills. The first part of the trip went fine. Perfect lift off, perfect landing. The patient was loaded on board without a hitch, followed by a second perfect lift off.

Forty minutes into the flight for Arrowhead, John sent out a garbled mayday.

Hikers in the Martin Tudor-Jurupa Hills Regional Park spotted the erratically flying medevac, thought Hollywood was making a movie. They filmed the crash with their phones, only afterwards realizing that no, it was real life, not cinema.

Alpha was going up in flames as the hikers ran to it. One of them, a girl named Haley Collins, burned her hands and arms trying to free a screaming man from the rear compartment.

Haley's brothers busted John out. The older one's girlfriend hauled Haley clear. The other four hikers tried shoveling dirt on the wreckage to smother the fire.

It didn't work. The rescue crews had little trouble finding the crash site when the oxygen tanks Alpha carried blew sky high.

Steven Caldwell, John's direct supervisor, was already on the phone to Lt. O'Neill at that point. It would be an hour before O'Neill called the boys. Daniel called Evan.

Evan grabbed his stuff immediately and headed for the airport in Toronto, getting a seat on the first available flight back to the States. It didn't matter where, it just had to be America.

He'd lost count of how many planes, what cities he caught them in, and what time it had been. He'd kept track of what was going on at home because that was what was important.

Dean and Sam had caught a small commuter flight out of San Jose as fast as they could, skidding into Arrowhead by one. John had been in surgery.

He was settled in a room by seven, and now, at twelve thirty in the morning, everything was in a holding pattern to see what happened next.

The boys come down from staring into John's room, Sam spotting Evan and curling up against him without saying a word. Evan reaches for the bag at his feet, sticking a straw into a carton of milk before handing it over.

Not moving his head from Evan's shoulder, Sam drinks slowly, letting the nutrition work its way into his system.

Dean gets fruit punch, opened but minus the straw, and downs most of it in one long swallow.

Seeing a certain pinched shadow in Dean's eyes, Evan rummages through his coat pockets until he comes up with the ibuprofen he stashed there.

Five pills get chased by the last of the punch, and Dean hands the bottle back after mutely asking if Sam or Daniel needed any.

Sipping at his coffee, Evan waits. Dean'll tell him John's condition in his own good time, and it'll be minus any of the gobbledygook the doctors spout off.

Daniel's quiet too, staring off into space.

John's severely burned along his right side, Dean finally says. He's got head injuries and he's in a coma. If he wakes up, and doesn't get any infections, he'll live a long, mostly normal life.

Provided, Evan thought to himself, he didn't grieve himself to death over his team.

Thanks to Haley, they knew someone other than John survived the initial crash.

Unfortunately, between the fire and the explosion, whoever the screaming man was, he didn't live long.

Alpha's crew and patient weren't the only casualties. Three of the eight Good Samaritans had died at the scene when the helicopter went to glory. A fourth was pronounced dead at the hospital. Number five, Haley, is down the hall from John for observation and her younger brother Ben is sedated two floors up.

The boy had been fine until the six o'clock news showed one of the videos the hikers shot before they knew the truth. Rumor, according to Daniel, was that a member of the S.A.R team had found an intact cellphone on the forest floor and sold it.

Evan hopes the fucker loses his job.

~~~~

Bobby and John discussed their stories as they drove from Sioux Falls to Long Beach.

It was, Bobby thought, a damned shame he needed one, seeing that not too long ago, the boys would've welcomed his presence with open arms and no questions asked.

Three years of making excuses to avoid visiting Dean and Sam, or have them come to him, had sadly taken their toll. When he'd called to offer his help, Sam had politely shut him down cold.

He could keep his distance now, just like he did for Thanksgiving, Christmas and the New Year. For their birthdays and Easter, Memorial Day and the Fourth of July...

Really, they were fine on their own. Bobby shouldn't strain himself pretending to be family or anything.

With that, Sam metaphorically slammed the phone down. Bobby's next call, to Dean, went straight to voicemail.

Lorne answered his phone long enough to say Bobby "fucked up, the kids are hurting, and calling them is not the best way to make amends. Either show up to duke it out face to face, or don't."

Bobby hadn't had time to get any questions in before Lorne was gone, so he'd resorted to calling Ash over at the Roadhouse and having him check the Internet for updates.

He might not live in the Dark Ages, but Bobby'd be hog-tied and locked in his trunk before he'd go around toting one of those damn folding computers.

Not that Sam hadn't tried to convince him. Having information at your fingertips wherever you went and whenever you wanted it? Tempting, but no. Bobby had enough problems with all the stuff he already carried on hunts. He wasn't adding to it until he damned well had to.

Depression swamped him, thinking about Sam. Ten hours into a twenty-four hour road trip and he still hadn't figured out what to say. Oh, he and John were working on what angles they were gonna use to get info on the crash and victims, but what to tell the kids...

If he should say anything at all.

He wasn't getting any younger, plus, the Winchester boys were out of the game. If he got close to them again, with them civilians and all...then something punched his ticket...

They'd come out of retirement to avenge him, probably get themselves killed in the process.

He knew the first part like he knew his name. The second he feared like nothing else.

His phone ringing distracted him from his thoughts, and Bobby fished it out of his coat, checking the Caller ID.

Ash didn't beat around the bush, passing over the address of the hospital in San Bernardino County where everyone involved in the crash had been taken. Sheppard was in critical condition, one unidentified civilian in stable condition, three more treated and released. Both medics plus five civilians - counting the medevac's patient - were dead.

Promising to get 'names and doctor type facts later' Ash had chosen to hack into the television station's computers first to get the unedited version of the cellphone video. Bobby really needed to see it as soon as possible. Find an Internet cafe in the morning and open up email.

Wear headphones too, because Ash got into the 911 call the hikers had made, and he'd found the radio conversations between Sheppard and the air traffic controllers already loaded into an investigator's hard-drive.

There was E.V.P every-freaking-where and what running it through Goldwave produced had to be heard to be believed.

Bobby asked for a sample, but Ash refused. He'd emailed the files already. Get to a computer and get them straight from there.

With a comment about needing some tequila courage, Ash hung up.

Bobby relayed the conversation, such as it had been, to John, who grunted, keeping his eyes on the road. In two hours, they were outside Salt Lake City, pulling into a motel that offered Internet service.

Bobby checked them in. They unloaded weapons, food and John's laptop from the back of the truck, then settled down to see things for themselves.

It wasn't the carryout cups of chili that gave Bobby indigestion later on in the night.

The cloud of smoke that caught Bobby's attention in the web posted video had definitely been moving against the wind.

The media hadn't aired the part - and Ash had thoughtfully zoomed in and slowed the video down to a frame by frame crawl to make sure John and Bobby saw it - where you see two men grappling in the back, one of them doing something to the oxygen tanks and the other one trying to stop him.

The picture zoomed in a little more as the helicopter slammed into the treetops. Even with flames trailing Life Flight Alpha's final descent to the ground, Bobby was able to pick out another small cloud of smoke moving independently of the breeze. It was escaping the rear compartment through a shattered window, vanishing into the undergrowth to watch and wait.

~~~~

No omens.

John Winchester knew what to look for to signal the presence of demonic activity. He kept track of California as best he could without living in the state, and he knew that there hadn't been any omens to signal this latest attack on his family.

Crop failures, electrical storms, cattle mutilations.

None of them had appeared in California before the crash. It was like the demon popped in just long enough to fuck up his boys' lives and vanished into the woodwork again.

While Bobby was in the can, John called the hospital Ash said Sheppard was in. The person on the other end refused to give out any information, even after John told them he was Sheppard's father-in-law.

Which he is. Kind of. Maybe.

He absently rubbed his jaw as he flipped to another phone and called a different number for Arrowhead, this time claiming to be a reporter. Same answer. The immediate family had invoked their right to privacy. No more information was being given.

He wasn't going to call his boys. They weren't answering Bobby, so it was a sucker's bet they'd answer for him.

He picked up Bobby's phone, scrolled through the list of contacts. He remembered the names of his sons' friends from the report Olivia had given him back in July and he knew Bobby had called at least one of them since this mess started.

Bingo. Lorne. The man his boys lived with in Long Beach.

He started to punch the number into his own phone, thought better of it, and put both machines down as Bobby came back from the bathroom.

They turned to the E.V.P files Ash had sent over.

Inhuman growls, screams, wails, moans.

"Bring ... down. He ... no survivors."

Laughter, cold as the grave. "No survivors."

~~~~

Sunrise brought reinforcements from Engine 77, the people Evan had missed yesterday by being so late getting to the hospital.

One of them was Ronon, the guy who sometimes paid him for sex.

Could today get any better?

Can you smell the sarcasm yet?

Dean's pretending he's asleep, his head on Evan's left thigh, his own and Daniel's jackets over his chest. On the other side, under Evan's coat, Sam's actually dozed off.

No sense in acting like Evan's sitting on the floor for any reason other than John. The Winchester brothers don't use strangers for pillows.

In his own exhaustion, Daniel can be forgiven for missing the huge amounts of awkward going on between Ronon and Evan as he introduces them.

Evan has enough energy in him to be thankful that Ronon doesn't say anything. He's not in the mood to have a conversation with Daniel like the one he had with John months ago.

The soap opera that could have been gets further derailed as Jack and his lady Elizabeth turn up, bearing food and coffee like blessings from God. After copping a bagel, Daniel heads out to get a shower and a nap in the rooms Jack rented at the neighboring Lido Motel.

Last night, Evan's told, Elizabeth pointed out that the five hours round trip between Long Beach and Colton was no one's idea of a good time. Especially tired and upset. Since Jack was insisting on guards for John, he'd better be ready to provide somewhere for those people to rest.

An ironic eyebrow lift from Jack speaks volumes about knowing they'd need somewhere close by to drag Dean and Sam when they finally collapsed.

Evan doesn't verbally comment on that either, but does ask about the guards. He figured 77's presence was about brotherhood, not protection.

It's both, Jack explains. Making sure that John, even unconscious, knows there are people who care for him nearby. A side benefit is not, absolutely not, giving Patrick Sheppard a chance to pull a fast one and have John taken somewhere Jack can't find him.

To that end, Jack's going to draw up a schedule. There'll be at least two people in the hospital at any given time. One constant presence in the lounge with an eye on John's door, and the others trading off potty, food and exercise breaks with them.

With a glance down at Dean, who's truly catnapping now, Evan makes it clear that he's going to be included on guard duty and Winchester wrangling. Jack acknowledges it, then states plainly that he would've already written Evan into the mental version of schedule if he'd known Evan existed.

To know John is to know that John keeps his private life locked away in a very small box and only he's got the combination. No one asks, John doesn't tell, there's nothing more can be said on the subject. Evan shrugs at Jack in a gesture of 'what can you do?'

The answer is: Sit and wait.

~~~~

Along with Cameron, Vala and Samantha, comes a cadre of doctors and technicians. They don't like taking John out of his nice, totally sterile room for testing, but something was wrong with the M.R.I they took the day before and they need to do it over again.

Awakened by the voices of strangers, Dean follows them down to Radiology. The neurologist isn't keen on the company, but Dean's not in the mood to be denied. He stares the woman down until she consents that he can at least be in the hall outside the testing center.

While it's empty, the janitor goes in to clean John's room. He strolls out after a minute or so, comes over to the group.

To Sam, he holds out a pitifully small plastic bag, explaining its John's stuff. Lot safer with his family than laying in the room, looking all shiny and pretty for someone dishonest to walk away with.

Sam slowly takes the bag, opening it and gently tugging John's dogtags away from the silver caduceus that was the symbol of Life Flight Alpha.

The garnets that formed the eyes of the snakes are gone. The wings at the top of the staff are blackened, and the chain is warped where the fire got to it.

Through the clear plastic of the bag, everyone can see that the face of John's watch is cracked, the band destroyed by someone's scissors. His keys, wallet and loose change are flame kissed.

The wristband John never took off is gone completely, either burned away or cut off by the doctors.

Vala goes to touch Sam, offering comfort, but he flinches away from her. Elizabeth had tried to hug Dean earlier and gotten a similar response. The women don't take it personally.

Twisting his fingers in the necklaces, Sam swallows hard and thanks the janitor - Shue - for bringing the bag out to them. Shue nods, starts to turn away, stops to say:

"Don't worry. Old Hades ain't nowhere near ready to deal with the likes of John Sheppard." He grins, flicks a finger at the mangled caduceus. "He'll be fine kiddo. You'll see."

With a little salute towards everyone, Shue walked back to John's room. They could hear him whistling to himself as he resumed cleaning.

~~~~

Sam calls Stanford at lunchtime, taking the rest of the year off due to a family emergency.

Dean's arrangements have already been handled. Jack had spent the walk from the motel to Arrowhead talking to Lt. Dawson from Engine 39 about doing a personnel exchange now instead of waiting for the usual date in May.

Dawson put Dean and Dean's family in his prayers as he assigned Jennifer Keller to his station. They'd already found someone to cover the rest of Dean's shifts this week, so Jenn would start bright and early Monday.

When its brought before them, Winchesters approve the plan to send Daniel and Cam north with Jenn to pack up and bring the cars down. Dean trusted Cameron behind the wheel of the Impala, while Daniel had Sam's okay to handle the Mustang.

Their things coming home to Long Beach for the duration, the brothers see no reason not to allow Jenn to sublet their apartment.

It costs too much to break a lease, or to start one, and part of Jenn's reason for switching with Dean was acceptance into Stanford's medical program, so no matter what else goes on, she needs a long term base of operations.

They all agreed to work out who was whose roommate when Sam returned to school.

John's been back in his room for a little while now, and the doctors have had a chance to study the new test results. They drag Jack away for a powwow a bit after Sam hangs up his phone.

Compared to a newly returned, slightly rested and freshly showered Daniel, the remaining overnight watchers look like roadkill. Likewise disturbing, while Sam got down half a muffin before calling it quits, Dean hasn't eaten a single bite of anything anyone has put in front of him. Instead of food, he's been drinking endless amounts of coffee and juice.

Restless at the best of times, Vala went walkabout during The Price is Right, hunting for something to tempt Dean's appetite.

Coming back with her prizes, she proudly offers him the French fries first.

Piping hot, chili and cheese soaked fries from the finest greasy spoon in the neighborhood.

Dean politely declines, calmly gets to his feet. The one overt sign he's in trouble is when he shoves Ronon back into the men's room rather than wait for the lifeguard to clear the door.

Evan's radar is already on DEFCON Three and he makes split second eye contact with Samantha as he passes her on his way to Dean. She nods in agreement, beginning to coax everyone to find somewhere else to be until they've finished their lunches.

Vala's frozen, her fist against her mouth, her eyes wet. She was only trying to help, and as usual, it went wrong on her.

Of course, no one ever told her that Dean, on a good day, has got a problem with certain kinds of foods.

Today? Is so far from good its not even in the same galaxy.

~~~~

Despite how much he wants to, Sam knows better than go after his brother. Dean's on his default setting. Emotions are for girls, keep everything bottled up and for God's sake, don't ever talk about anything. That is the Winchester Way.

The Sheppard Way is to find someone to physically work it out of you. Push you until sheer exhaustion pulled the walls down and let everything gush out. Your closest friend, a loved one ... they'd listen, give you their wisdom, their support and some of their energy. In the final step, you'd take that energy and do katas or jog until your walls are back where they need to be.

In payment, you make damn sure you do the same for the friend when they need it.

Last time Dean was this strung out was when Paramedic Blake died on his watch. John had found a martial arts dojo, proceeded to chase Dean around it with escrimna sticks until Dean lost his temper.

This time, John is the reason Dean is upset, so no help there.

Sam's eyes move over Cameron as the man steps into the elevator, cuddling his sniffling wife close. Cam knew John's ways, had benefited from them when Grammie died.

Problem was, despite being ex-Air Force, Cam didn't have the mindset John did. Causing physical pain to ease emotional pain wasn't really in his repertoire.

Jack's too old and Dean won't fight with Evan. Not the balls to the wall ass kicking that Dean needs anyway. Argue at the top of their voices, sure no problem, but Dean won't raise a hand to their housemate.

Reluctantly, Sam watches Ronon, who'd come out of the men's room and now leans against the wall by the door.

Guarding all three of Sam's dearest with one casual stance, as Ronon's still within sight of John's room.

Just like the dreams.

Hearing Elizabeth gently encourage the big Hawaiian to give Dean some privacy, Sam walks over and lays his hand on her arm, telling her Ronon has to stay. Sam needs him for something.

She glances at him questioningly but doesn't argue, merely asks that someone let the crew know when its okay to come back.

Samantha's just finished clearing the table of all the stuff that Vala brought in. She and Elizabeth corral Jack as he returns and get him to come with them instead of reporting.

Once the lounge is clear, Sam takes a deep breath before swallowing a huge serving of humble pie.

He asks if Ronon will help him. If he'll take Dean out somewhere and administer a healthy dose of the Sheppard Way to him.

Sam confesses, before Ronon can reply, that he can't do it. Dean won't go there with him, he's too afraid of hurting his baby brother.

Yes, Sam calls himself Dean's baby brother. When it comes to fighting, unless they're back to back, Dean never thinks Sam can hold his own. Its a contradiction they've never been able to figure out.

Ronon doesn't say anything for a moment, then gestures with his head. "What about Lorne?"

"Same thing," Sam answers. "Dean won't hit him."

Ronon chews on that thought. "They together?"

Sam shakes his head. He doesn't mention that Evan and John might be. If he says it and is wrong, Evan'll skewer him like a kabob.

"You and him?" That question has the most curiosity in it that Sam's ever heard out of Ronon.

"Me and Evan? Oh, no. No. Hell no. He's practically my mom."

Soon as the words are out of Sam's mouth, he wants to sew his lips shut. He's never referred to Evan as Mom except to Dean and John as a joke, and to Dr. Kate while explaining his feelings for the man.

A direct contrast to how many people have heard him call John his Dad.

Ronon only comments mildly, "Explains Dean's no hitting thing."

"Yeah. Probably." Sam admits.

Some small noise from in the men's room has Ronon nudging Sam to the side away from the door.

Dean comes out first, paler than he went in. The strong smell of mouthwash is battling it out with the sour scent of vomit on his breath. He doesn't acknowledge his brother or Ronon, instead walking over to put his forehead against the window of John's room.

Evan follows after a heartbeat, face carefully blank, saying, "We need salt."

Sam opens his mouth, because people will flip if they go pouring lines at the door, but Evan shakes his head. "They won't see it."

Ronon's eyes flick to Dean, flick to Sam, dance over Evan. "How much?"

"Half full shaker should do it." Evan answers.

"Be back." With that, Ronon pushes off the wall, goes to the elevator. Sam boggles at him, then at Evan.

"Did I...miss something?"

Dean answers from the window, almost too soft for Sam to hear. "He thinks I'm a witch." Without lifting it off the glass, Dean turns his head to look at Evan, who consistently checks 'other' under religious preferences. "Sorry. I keep giving advice to The Charmed Ones and he's heard me."

Evan shrugs, familiar with Dean's long running feud against television's favorite magical trio. "What's wrong with calling yourself a witch? Easier to explain your belief system with that than atheistic ghosthunter." He spoke in a Valley Girl accented falsetto, trying to break the tension. "You believe in ghosts but not God? Like, what is wrong with you?"

Dean starts to say something, decides not to. Starts to say something else, stops again and shakes his head. "I'm not equipped for this conversation." He steps away from the window, rubbing his eyes tiredly.

Thumb pointing over his shoulder, Evan asks in his normal voice, "How many pills did you lose in there?"

"Two. I got Excedrin Migraine from the gift shop." Dean rubs his eyes again. "Doesn't matter though. They weren't helping anyway."

"Migraine?" Sam queries. "When did that start?"

Dean's answer of "yesterday morning" surprises both listeners, who figured it was stress and the hospital's fluorescent lights causing the problem.

Sam wants to know why Dean didn't say anything about it in San Jose. "You in the clinic, John being here. Kinda took my mind off things" is the sardonic reply.

Evan cocks an eyebrow at Sam, who shrugs and tells him he got hit with a mental lightning bolt. A handful of ibuprofen, some water and some downtime cured the problem.

Then comes the question Dean's been dreading.   
"Don't you think it's weird that both of you..?"

Dean's about to switch to back default mode and make a joke, but Evan pins him with a look. More than that expression, Dean's suddenly sick of handling the freakiness alone.

"Only if Sammy's seeing spotlights too."  
Sam immediately says, "Migraines can cause vision problems. It's a well known symptom."

Dean shakes his head, interrupting. "I thought of that Sammy. But it doesn't explain," he hesitates. "Some other stuff."

Acting on an instinct, Evan steps closer, laying a hand on Dean's shoulder. "What color light do I have?"

Dean starts to jerk away in annoyance then  
relaxes when he sees Evan's dead serious.

"There's more yellow than anything else."

"What's next on the list?"

Dean considers for a moment. "Purple."

"Lavender right? Kinda pale?" Evan tests.

"No." Dean's voice is firm. "Dark like a Vikings' jersey."

Evan sighs when he tells the boys that according to some people he knows, those two colors dominate his aura. Since Dean's never met or spoken to those people, there's no way he could've known that.

Then come the words. "Sounds like you have the Second Sight."

A quote ran through Dean's mind as his heart dropped into his shoes. 'When you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.'

Sherlock Holmes would be so proud of him for doing exactly that. The idea didn't give him any comfort, considering Evan's pretty much confirmed his half-assed theory of being some kind of a psychic.

If there'd been anything left in his stomach, he'd have thrown up again.

"Dean," Sam's voice broke into his thoughts. "What's going through your brain?"

Dean shook his head again, stalling. "Nothing good."

The elevator dinged, and the trio turned to see Ronon stepping off with a small bowl, a box of salt, and a bottle of water in his hands. "Here."

"You raided the kitchen?" Dean asked, amused.

"Saw a star in a circle," Ronon handed the supplies over to Evan. "Asked the person wearing it."

Evan flinched at the reference to the tattoo on his stomach, but thankfully, the boys didn't catch it.

"It's a pentacle," Sam couldn't help himself.

"Whatever." Ronon shrugged.

"Less discussion please. More keeping the nurses off my back?" Evan requested.

He might be a lapsed Wiccan, as in hasn't-drawn-a-Circle-in years, but his mother had made sure he'd never forget to bless water and draw protective sigils anywhere he lay his head, or anywhere someone he loved did.

It was the only other thing she'd been very un-hippie-ish about.

He cleared the unhappy thoughts about the main thing she'd been militant on from his brain and checked the hallway in both directions. It was clear, so he moved closer to John's doorway and knelt down.

"Need me gone?" Ronon asked.

"Nah. It's not gonna burn your eyes out or anything," Evan joked. Then he lowered his voice to where only the man standing at his shoulder could hear. "Dean, you...might get a show."

"I'd wondered." Dean mumbled in resignation.

As he mixed and prayed, the yellow vanished from Evan's - Dean had to force himself to say the word - aura, and the purple slipped into black. What had been a faint, background color - orange - appeared more strongly, with more than a hint of deep red.

John and half the patients on the ward were red. Dean didn't need to be told that it wasn't a good color.

He started to say something, stopped as the glyph Evan drew with the blessed water seemed to eat into the floor and glow up at him from under the tile.

Carefully, Evan got to his feet, balancing the bowl in the crook of his left arm, right hand dripping.

Like the floor, the sigils he painted on the window seemed to etch themselves inside. To a fascinated Dean, clear glass had gone stained, like a church window.

He was still admiring the work when Evan suddenly turned and reached up, fingers dancing on Ronon's forehead.

Since the whole thing with the seeing stuff started, Ronon had been a forest, all browns and greens, with only fleeting glimpses of blue. When Evan's hand went back into the bowl of water, Ronon's forest was on fire.

Evan's orange, yellow, red and black twisted and writhed around Ronon's aura for a long, long moment. Then the imagined fire banked, cooled, and Evan's colors sank into Ronon, so much that Dean had to strain to see them.

He couldn't stop the impressed "whoa" that escaped him.

"What'd you do?" Ronon asked.

"I like my knights in shiny armor," Evan answered tiredly. "Ask that guy...what's his name?"

"Daniel?" Sam tried.

"Him I know. The married one."

"Cameron," the younger men answered together.

"He's Catholic right? Ask him to find a priest that'll bless him, John, and the room when its his turn on duty."

"Won't that screw up what you did?" Ronon wondered.

"Not unless the priest is into murdering everyone different from him."

"Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," Sam rolled his eyes.

"Do not get me started. My brain-to-mouth filter went on strike at oh one hundred," Evan warned. He twitched his aching shoulders, mindful of the bowl in the crook of his elbow.

"What're you gonna do with the rest of that?" Ronon asked.

"I'd love to get in that room, put some protection on John and on the window." Evan muttered the next line. "Pass over my freaking iPod so he's got something to listen to besides the machines."

"Nobody's around. Do the," Ronon gestured. "I can ask the doc about a radio or something later."

Evan turned to Dean, the only one with medical knowledge. "Is it safe?"

The question got the serious thought it deserved. "They took him out of there for testing. Hospital itself is dirtier than you."

"Thanks. I think. Close ranks boys."

Evan stepped into John's room, going for the window. It was cowardly, but he wasn't ready just yet to stand over his friend and have the scent of burnt flesh in his nose.

A few quick passes with his wet fingers and the protections were set on the window. Feeling stupid, Evan sketched a glyph over the air vent, making sure nothing could use it as an entrance.

He shot a glance at the door, checking the body language of his temporary shields. They were still acting casual, so he headed for the bed.

One look, and Evan shook his head. "Dean. Get in here."

"What?"

"Correct me if I'm wrong but, shouldn't the doctors have busted all the blisters?"

Dean slid inside the room and came over to the bed. "It's called debridement and yeah, they should've, but those might be new. First degree burns can bubble up days after the original injury." He cocked his head, voice turned puzzled as he rested a gentle hand on the unburned side of John's back. "Except his shoulder was already.."

There was no warning. Dean jerked once, eyes rolling white.

Evan's alarmed yelp drew Sam and Ronon's attention. Before they could come fully inside the room, Dean shook like a wet dog, staggering away from the bed.

Sam caught him as he fell, dragged him into the hallway. Evan hesitated for a heartbeat, rescued what little water survived his surprised jolt, and marked John's skin with protective sigils.

He knew, to his bones, Dean would've done the same thing if their positions were reversed.

With a soft touch to John's hair, Evan hurried out.

The whole escapade had gone unnoticed, the nurses still busy everywhere but John's section of the ward.

Dean was trembling as he sat on the floor, Sam hovering over him.

"Don't ask," was the first thing Dean gasped as Evan crouched down next to him. "I have no fucking clue."

"If we give you a minute, you gonna be able to walk out of here on your own?" Evan questioned instead.

Dean leaned against Sam's legs, closing his eyes. "Maybe."

Ronon called one of the crew waiting downstairs - Evan wasn't paying enough attention to know exactly who - then helped Sam get Dean up on his feet again.

Dean could walk, but talking or chewing gum at the same time was beyond him. They got him on the elevator safely, Evan and Sam on either side.

Daniel met the trio on the first floor, under orders to drive them to the motel instead of letting them walk.

He also helped carry an unconscious Dean into the room ten minutes later.


	11. Insanity is All Around Us

Sam was drooling on his arm, which meant the warm, heavy weight at his back had to be Dean.

Definitely not how they'd all gone to sleep, but Evan wasn't gonna worry about it right this second. He was more concerned with figuring out how to get out of bed, preferably without waking them and before his bladder exploded.

Couch or bed, Sam liked to touch, to have his arms around someone. Not restricting, just snuggling.

Evan had no idea what Dean liked, seeing how this was the first time they'd ever shared a space.

He pushed aside the regretful thoughts with practiced ease, concentrating on his immediate problem. It took a couple of careful maneuvers, then Evan scooted clear.

Flickering blue light caught his attention as he left the bathroom. The connecting doors between the motel rooms were opened a little, one of John's off duty guards watching television in the neighboring space.

Evan glanced down at himself, deciding his sweatpants and t-shirt were decent enough for even married with a jealous spouse type company, and tapped on the 'inner' door.

The gruff "yeah" he got in reply made him reconsider his decision.

The choice now: Body armor or naked?

Oh to hell with it. Evan pushed the door open, stepped in.

Ronon was wearing shorts and a tank top, sitting lotus style on the bed Evan was pretty sure he himself had started the night in.

Like he could read minds, Ronon's first words were, "Daniel said to tell you, Sam's the reason for the relocation."

"He is?"

"'Woke up, freaked out,'" Ronon used air quotes. "'Carried you in there.'"

"I use to sleepwalk," Evan muttered. "That's actually a relief to hear."

Ronon grunted, turned his attention to C.S.I New York. "There's food. Coolers under the desk are pot luck. Little bit of everything. And Jamie brought soup just for Dean."

"Jamie?" Not a person Evan had met yet.

"Markham. Him and Stacks got the overnight shift."

"Oh. Have," Evan pointed over his shoulder. "They been up yet?"

"Dean's stayed out. Sam was that...whatever... before I got here. Nothing since."

Evan rubbed at the back of his neck. "What kind of soup is there?"

Ronon pointed to a red thermos on the heater. "Tomato. The blue one is..squash. Figured Dean can drink 'em like smoothies."

"Better than the broth I was gonna pour into him." Evan watched Gary Sinise run around on the television screen for a few minutes, letting his brain wake up some more.

He figured he'd had about seven hours of solid sleep, yet he still felt like he'd been hit by a freight train.

Ronon cleared his throat. "Sheppard's my family." He said without preamble. "I don't want him hurt."

Not looking away from the television, Evan answered with a guarded, "Nobody does."

"Right. But. John doesn't fuck around. If he's with you, he feels something." Ronon's voice went dark as he repeated. "I don't want him hurt."

"He's not 'with me' in any sense of the word. No sleeping, no screwing, and sometimes? We're not even talking."

"Uhhuhn. What about Dean?"

"Dean and I don't have that kind of relationship either." The 'thanks to my damned white knight complex' went unspoken. "And let me head the next one off at the pass by saying, Encino Man impression aside, neither do Sam and I."

"If you're not getting paid, why're you here?"

Still watching the television, Evan ground his teeth, again stopping the words he wanted to say. He absolutely was not going to add to Dean and Sam's stress levels by fighting with Ronon twenty feet away from them. "I was born human."

"What?" Confusion replaced the hard edge to Ronon's questions.

"You don't swim twenty-four hours a day looking for people to rescue. You do it for eight straight, then you do something else for the next sixteen. I don't fuck all day. Sheppard and the kids are part of my life off the clock, which isn't any of your business."

"Yes it is."

"No. It's not."

"John's my family."

"Which is the only reason I answered you in the first place." Evan finally turned to look at Ronon. "On a good day, John's my brother. On a bad day, he's the pain in the ass, third cousin I haven't seen in years. You want anymore information, you can ask him."

The hottie that played Detective Flack was onscreen when Evan started paying attention to the television again. "By the way, he knows how I date. So feel free to confess your sins."

"John knows you're a...?" With that amount of disbelief in his voice, it was a good thing Ronon was already sitting down.

"Whore?" It pissed Evan off to use the term.

In polite society, before you fucked someone, you spent sixty bucks for two tickets, drinks and popcorn at a movie you weren't really interested in, plus fifty or better for drinks and an overcooked, mass produced meal afterwards to talk about the movie. Three or more hours wondering 'will they/won't they put out' with fifty-fifty odds on won't.

They called it 'dating' and the time it took to spend over a hundred bucks 'getting to know someone' before sex made dating perfectly acceptable.

Evan wanted to know who he was hurting by cutting out the middlemen, getting the money himself, and going straight for the end zone?

'Cause he obviously wasn't hurting them enough if they could still complain.

He put an ice pack on his anger and answered honestly. "Yeah. He doesn't approve." Understatement of the freaking year. "But he knows."

"How?" Ronon's mouth ran ahead of his brain.

"I got roughed up. The hospital called him. He asked what happened, I told the truth."

Ronon remembered. He'd seen Lorne once or twice around this time last fall, then Lorne had disappeared until halfway into January. "You didn't answer the phone for a month."

Over the years, Lorne's voicemail would occasionally say "I am unavailable for consultation. Please try back after" insert date here. If it didn't have that message, calls were returned. Always.

He remembered asking the bartenders at the club if they'd seen Lorne. Wanting to swear out a missing person's report and finally convincing himself that Lorne had gotten busted.

Apparently he hadn't been in jail. Ronon felt like an ass.

"Nope." Evan's voice was nonchalant, then he abruptly changed the subject. "You said ...Stacks? Was on overnight. Where's Lt. O'Neill?"

"At the station. He's doing split shifts till John's transferred."

Say what? "Transferred?" Evan turned around again.

Ronon nodded. "I can tell it once, or tell it three times. You want them up and fed first?" He indicated the door.

"Yeah. Is there a microwave somewhere for the food?"

"Don't need one yet."

Evan didn't reply to that, walking quietly into the room he'd woken up in.

Sam hadn't moved, still curled up on his side, facing the center of the bed. Dean had rolled onto his back, and when Evan stepped closer to him, his green eyes opened.

"Hey."

"Yesterday wasn't a dream." Dean's voice was hoarse and bleak.

"No. It wasn't."

"I woke up, everything looked normal."

"Didn't stay that way?"

"No." The word was grim. "You're orange."

Evan cocked his head. "You can't see Sam's aura?"

"He's black," Dean sat up and rolled his shoulders. "I'm not sure I should be calm about that."

"If its just really dark colors, like navy or pine...relax. If its like looking at La Brea, then you worry."

"You sure?"

Evan blew out a breath. "About ninety percent, yeah. I need my mom's books to be one hundred."

"She had this stuff?"

"A few of our friends did."

Dean rubbed his forehead and eyes. "You still in pain?" Evan asked.

"Nothing like before."

"We'll start with the simple things. A good, hot shower, change of clothes. Then try to get something into your stomach."

"That'll work," Dean mumbled sarcastically.

"Well, a guy named Jamie thinks squash soup might help."

Dean thought about it for a minute. His stomach loudly gurgled its opinion on the matter. "He might be right. Dude makes a mean plomeek."

"Plo...?" Evan didn't finish the word, brain bouncing it around. "Vulcan soup?"

"Neelix wrote a cookbook." Dean swung his legs off the bed and stood. "Look ma, no hands!"

Evan gave a wry chuckle. "You make sure to leave the door unlocked, just in case. Hear me?"

Dean rolled his eyes. "Ears work fine, thanks." He noticed the open passage between rooms. "Who?"

"Ronon. Faster you shower, faster we'll all talk."

"We need to," Dean admitted. "Seriously, seriously need to."

~~~~

Dean didn't fall in the shower, and he kept the plomeek soup down just fine, both things that made Sam and Evan very happy people.

It didn't last of course. Happiness never does.

Evan had dragged the desk chair over and was using Ronon's bed as an ottoman. Dean was leaning against the headboard on the other bed, with Sam sitting at the foot.

Ronon started off by saying. "I dunno who knows what, so I'll go from the top."

He tilted his head side to side, cracking his neck and sorting his thoughts. "Okay. Caldwell called, Alpha's off the grid. They found it, hauled Sheppard out of the woods. Jack hunted around until he got somebody on the phone that told him John's going to Arrowhead."

Ronon cleared his throat. "We're already in the car when Jack calls the E.R, catches the San B Air Medics before they take off again. The Senior told him that John wasn't gonna make it. Head trauma, broken back, broken neck, internal bleeding. Third and fourth degree burns over sixty-five to seventy percent of his body."

"Fourth degree?" Evan broke in. "I've never heard of that."

Dean uncomfortably explained. "Because coroners use the term more often than doctors. Patients with fourth degree burns usually die of smoke inhalation, airway burns or shock before they get to the hospital. Its when the flames are deep in the body fat and starting to work on the muscle tissue."

Ronon got them back on target. "When we got here though, there's no bleeding, internal or otherwise, and there's nothing broken. They've listed him as critical because they're worried about 'unforeseen complications' and how low his G.C.S. score is."

"Glasgow Coma Scale." Dean supplied, seeing Evan's momentary blank look. To Ronon he asked. "What was it?"

"Three in the field and it hadn't budged."

"Understandable given the circumstances but I'd be freaked too." Dean swallowed thickly. "They did the first M.R.I." He prompted Ronon, who nodded.

"Whatever they saw, I didn't hear it, and Jack wasn't up to repeating it. He just told us - me, Cam and Daniel - what he said to you. 'It's bad.'"

Ronon grabbed his soda off the nightstand, took a long drink. "They wheeled John up for the wound debridement. The specialist comes out, tells us John's got second and third degree burns on fifty to fifty-five percent of his body." Recapping the bottle, he said to Dean and Sam. "You were there for that, so I'm gonna skip to after you left today. Jack called Doc Frasier when he got out of the meeting with the Arrowhead guys. He was kinda pissed."

"Something about the second M.R.I." Evan guessed.

"More than that." Ronon stretched his legs. "Whatever they were blaming John's low Glasgow on? Not there. No sign it had ever been there. No brain swelling, no bruises, no aneurysm, nada." Bottle still in his hand, he gestured. "Remember what the first doctor said?"

The others nodded. "Janet," Ronon backtracked to clarify for Evan. "Doc Frasier, came over with permission to read John's chart and watch them change the bandages. First off, her count didn't come close to fifty-five percent. More like eighteen, if she's counting the little patches on his chest and." He tapped himself on his right shoulder blade. "Whatever that is. Second, she saw first degree burns on the exposed skin. Under the bandages, she saw second degree burns, mostly superficial." His voice took on an awed tone. "She flipped her shit at the drugs. They've got him in a medically induced coma. According to both our docs - Janet yanked Carson in there - without the I.V.s, John would be awake and bitching to leave by now."

"You're kidding me. They're over medicating him?" Sam hissed in disbelief.

"The way I understand it, yeah. That's exactly what they're doing. Their line of treatment's more for the injuries that the so called specialist told us about, not the one for the level John actually is." Ronon blew out a breath. "Jack's pronounced Arrowhead FUBAR. Burn percentages wrong, degrees of severity wrong. Saying John was busted up inside when he wasn't, the M.R.I thing." He rolled his shoulders. "Janet's making arrangements for John to be sent back home to St. Mary's no later than Saturday. The docs here don't like it, but she and Carson could make a hell of a case for malpractice so they've shut up."

"Could the misdiagnoses have been the reason they were keeping us out of there?" Evan was more thinking out loud than asking.

"Damn if I know," Ronon answered anyway. "Maybe. Open wounds, MRSA everywhere." He trailed off, shrugged.

Except for Sam muttering, the room went quiet.

Too quiet, Evan realized. Dean hated medical incompetence with a fury. Considering this was about Dean's closest friend on Earth, they should be wrapping his knuckles and trying to cover up a hole in the wall by now.

Just as Evan started paying attention to him, Dean reached for his juice on the nightstand. "Ronon. When you say Janet saw firsts, what kind of firsts? Did she go into detail?" He twisted the cap off the bottle, but didn't drink.

"Bad sunburn." Ronon replied without hesitation. "Reddened skin. Hot to the touch. No blisters. I'd dump some aloe on it, tell 'em stay off the beach for awhile."

"That sounds like you saw them." Sam observed.

"Yeah, I did. When Our Docs got done raising hell, Arrowhead told us we could pull up a chair, make ourselves comfortable." Ronon addressed Sam, then Evan. "Before I forget..."

"The scapula and the pectoral." Dean cut in, setting his bottle aside. "Show me exactly where."

Ronon cocked an eyebrow at the tone, raised his hand to his chest to point. Dean shook his head. "On one of them."

Evan stood, moved up the bed. Ronon started to raise his hand again and Dean snarled. "I can't see through clothes."

"Dean, he doesn't have..." Sam tried to say.

Dean's lips peeled back from his teeth. "You're big on visualizing shit," he growled at his brother. "I need skin to see skin." His head snapped up to look at Evan. "And don't tell me to calm down."

About to say exactly that, Evan tilted his head. "Then do it." He pulled his shirt off and asked calmly. "Need me flat on the bed too?"

"Just sit. No room for you both standing." Misplaced anger banked for the moment, Dean watched carefully as Ronon's hands sketched out the amount of burned skin on "John's" chest. His eyes glazed as he pictured what he'd seen when the technicians had shifted John to the M.R.I machine that morning.

He blinked several times, trying to clear his vision, remembered that the colored lights surrounding everyone were part of his new reality and rubbed his eyes. "Ev, can you turn around so I can see John's..your...goddamn it." Dean's anger cranked back up a notch in frustration. "You know."

"Yeah." Evan faced the wall, Ronon's hands moving at the base of his neck, over his spine.

"You're sure that's what you saw?" Dean questioned.

"Sure enough I could copy it in lipstick." Ronon yanked open the nightstand drawer. "Elizabeth left one here." He was already a little tired of the attitude, not knowing where it was coming from.

"You don't need to do that."

"You sure?" Ronon shot back, slamming the drawer shut.

Dean nodded mutely, closing his eyes.

Evan put his shirt on again, walked past his chair and over to his coat. After fishing around in his pockets for a second, he lowballed the bottle of ibuprofen onto Dean's lap.

"Thanks, but I can handle it." Dean opened his eyes at the rattle and thump, put the medicine on the nightstand. His fingers lingered over it, then over his juice, before he put his hand back down on the bed. "This morning, I saw mid-level second degree burns - fully debrided - running from the bandages on the shoulder down to John's hip. This afternoon, there's nothing past the ribcage, and that little bit was blistered."

"I told Evan that fresh in the field, they'd be second degree. Showing up hours later makes them first." Dean held up a hand as Sam started to say something. "Sammy, I'm choking here. Lemme do a Heimlich, okay?"

Sam nodded, touched his brother's foot to give comfort.

Evan hadn't moved. Ronon was watching Dean like a hawk.

"I'm gonna start from the beginning." Dean ran his hand through his hair. "Last few months, I've been getting headaches. Nothing I couldn't write off, you know? Sirens howling in my ear all day. Smoke screwing with my sinuses, that freaking probie..." Just thinking about him made Dean's head throb.

Sam nodded again. He knew about the kid who followed Dean around the station like a duckling. Evan and Ronon wanted to ask, but neither of them broke the silence.

Dean licked his lips. "One of the really bad ones was when that crackhead overdosed downstairs."

Sam didn't nod this time, he raised an eyebrow. Jermaine'd let his ex-girlfriend Rita stay with him after she'd gotten booted out of her place. She'd made all the right promises, Jermaine had believed her, she'd been back to her old ways before the end of the week. Jermaine had come beating on their door, begging Dean to save Rita's useless ass.

Sam mostly remembered that Jermaine had interrupted some truly epic sex. By the time Dean was done getting Rita into the ambulance for her extra three hours of life, Sam had had to leave for school.

Dean had just recapped what happened that day - minus the sex of course, since Ronon didn't know about them - and had moved on.

Sam focused on what Dean was saying now, something uneasy stirring in his guts at the way his brother looked. The way he sounded.

"I kept seeing something out of the corner of my eye. Moving around, watching me. Fast, you know? Bigger than a bug." Dean sighed. "I was warm every time it got close, cold when it was somewhere else. My head started pounding like the base on a Zeppelin song. I knew Rita was gonna die and that...thing...was waiting for her." He met Sam's eyes. "I think it was a reaper Sammy."

"Only people who are going to die see those." If you believed what John Winchester's journal said on the subject. Sam did. To a point.

Dean spread his hands. "I thought so too. But after Rita, I started noticing stuff at the hospital when I'd drop somebody off. I'd see something flitting around certain rooms, next thing you know." He snapped his fingers. "The patients are Code Blue, then they're gone. Lot of long term illnesses, severe injuries, terminal cases of old age. I tore records apart looking for a connection that would say 'something freaky killed these people.'" He swallowed. "I didn't find dick."

Evan slowly moved back to his chair and sat down. Dean continued. "So I wrote it off. I was tired or air was playing with the curtains which played with the shadows. Another headache or two, I'm starting to hear things and I'm seeing the emergency lights reflecting on people funny." He chuckled without any humor. "Hindsight. Great thing."

"Then yesterday morning." Dean looked up, met Evan's eyes. "Yesterday morning I was in John's head when Alpha crashed."


	12. Shadows Gathering

What the hell can you say after a statement like that?

"What did you see, exactly?" Sam finally asked.

"Blue skies, no clouds. Controls in my hand." Dean answered.

"You're sure it was Sheppard?" Ronon wanted to know.

"I might not like it, but I've been up in enough eggbeaters now that I know the difference between them and the controls for a plane. More than that? I know John's hands. His watch should've left a bruise on his wrist from when the face got smashed, but considering how fast he's healing..." Dean blew out a breath and said bitterly. "Oh right, yeah, coming full circle, I might have had something to do with that."

"How so?" Evan questioned quietly.

"You ever got so angry you snapped? Next thing you know, you've put your fist through a window? In John's room. It wasn't anger. I dunno what it was, but I felt like ..." Dean rolled his eyes. "Call the Happy Home, but I felt like I was a pitcher of water being poured into a glass till I was almost empty. Then I was falling, Sammy grabbed me, everything stopped and I had my 'what the hell, oh shit, did I break that window?' moment."

"I take it that didn't happen during any of your other headaches?" Evan reached for his bottle of juice on the floor.

"Naw. Closest was last weekend ..." Dean's eyes flicked from Evan to Sam in a silent message. "Lincoln. His back was bothering him. Did a massage." He coughed, blushed, went for full disclosure. "Ah. You know. Some other stuff." He grabbed his own juice, deliberately not looking at Ronon. "Good times, but I felt like I'd gone through the spin cycle afterwards."

"Did you have dinner before your...dessert?" Evan's lips curved, but his eyes told Dean the question wasn't idle.

"Later on. I felt better when I ate, but I wasn't up for round three." Dean blushed again. "I kinda...fell asleep on him."

"That's a good morning waiting to happen." Ronon commented teasingly.

"Little brother getting traumatized here!" Sam protested. More like 'getting nostalgic.' He totally would've gotten more books out of the library if he'd known what the effect would be.

Then again, 'getting freaked out' could apply too. He'd thought Dean's hands were extra hot because of the massage oil.

"You can handle it," Dean lightly kicked his brother in the butt. "I'm the one with nightmares after walking in on you and what's his name."

Sam huffed, taking his cue. "We were still dressed."

"Pants were open Sammy!! I saw things I haven't seen since you were potty trained!"

Ronon, the intended audience for their playacting, snorted as he reached for his soda. "Brain bleach all around. How's that?"

"Sounds good." Sam and Dean said together, wholly unintentional, causing Ronon to crack up in a cleansing laugh.

Evan let the mirth die down and took a swallow of juice. "TANSTAAFL." He pronounced it tanst-afell. "To quote Mercedes Lackey, 'there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.' Just like the energy to run or swim, powers have got to come from somewhere. If you did heal John, and did do...something...to Lincoln, you were working with what you had in your tank. Can't do a triathlon on nothing but water."

"Like in that book. Firestarter." Ronon had a lightbulb moment. "She blows something up for those guys, they're monitoring how many calories she used." He ignored the surprised look Evan shot him and asked Dean. "You didn't eat yesterday, but what about...?"

Dean thought for a minute. "It was Crystal's birthday. We had pizza and cake for lunch."

"Which is why, after...whatever...you were awake long enough to eat again." Evan theorized, chin in hand. "Plus, I doubt Lincoln's back was half as damaged as John's entire body."

"Did you touch Dad in the hall? Going with him to testing?"

Dean did the usual 'deny Sam said that' with the Dad thing, but hesitated over the question. Hell with it, he'd already said more embarrassing stuff than this. "Might've patted his foot. And I...petted his hair." Despite intentions, the last confession came out a mumble.

"You feel anything then?" Sam asked.

"I don't think so." Dean replied honestly, after a long moment's contemplation. "I...I'd just woken up. Things were kinda...blurry. Confused."

"Have you picked up anything from anyone else?" Evan leaned forward.

Dean shook his head. "Shadows and whispers in the hospital. Lights around everyone. Seeing the wards you did on the room. The...vision thing and the maybe healing thing. That's it. That's enough, actually. The freak show can end now, thanks."

"Clairvoyance, clairaudience, and Reiki healing. One hell of a smörgåsbord." Evan sighed.

"Clairvoyance being the scientific term for Spirit Sight?" Ronon cracked his knuckles. "Clairaudience is hearing spirits?"

"Yep." Evan nodded.

"Can you tell me what the colors mean?" Dean requested. "I know red is sickness, 'cause all the patients got more of that than anything else."

"The only dark color besides gray that's a bad sign." Evan confirmed, taking a quick sip of juice.

"You said black earlier." Dean's eyes slid to Sam for a heartbeat.

"Black like tar. Like...paint. A blending so complete that you can't sort it out no matter how many halogens you shine on it." Evan specified.

Dean's gaze sharpened as he turned to study his brother again. He relaxed, letting out a breath he didn't know he'd been holding. Sammy sure as hell wasn't wreathed in pastels, but Dean could tell the colors apart if he stared at them hard enough.

Sam caught the by play, swallowed nervously. "I'm...my...?"

"Easy Sasquatch," Dean booted Sam's ass with his foot again. "You're weird, but we knew that already."

"Rebellious, if I remember right." Evan told Sam thoughtfully.

"How long has it been since you looked at those books you were talking about?" Dean asked.

Evan rolled his eyes. "College, so we're talking about ten years? Luckily, I'm a sentimental packrat. I didn't get rid of anything of Mom's except clothes. We get back home, you two can help me drag the stuff out of the garage."

"Garage?" Sam blinked. "But. There's nothing in there."

Evan gave Ronon a look before saying. "There's a hidden door to the apartment overhead."

Responding to Evan's silent warning, Ronon offered. "If you're going into stuff you don't want me hearing, I can turn the t.v. on in the other room."

"Just don't repeat anything." Evan stated firmly. "Because I'll know exactly whose ass to kick if word gets out."

Ronon tilted his head. "You're the coven's leader?"

Evan slowly nodded. "Good a term as any."

"You've been reading up?" Dean raised an eyebrow at Ronon.

"Samantha lent me her laptop." He shrugged. "I wanted to know what I should tell Cameron to get the priest to do."

"I know it's a Blessing for the Sick, but I have no clue what the warding is called." Sam frowned, absently playing with his necklace.

"What I know about modern Christianity wouldn't fill a shot glass." Evan stated. Dean shrugged indifferently, drank some juice.

"Well, I had no idea either and my Google Fu sucks. I got Cam and Stacks to go confession instead. They ate the cookies and the priest did the," Ronon made the sign of the cross with his hand. "Over them at the end of it. Plus the blessing on John."

"Hopefully that'll be enough." Evan tossed his empty bottle at the trashcan.

"Maybe Daniel could find out what it's called." Sam stretched.

"Better catch him before he leaves then." Ronon finished his soda. "Jack wants him and Cam back here in time for John's transfer, so they're heading out in." He glanced at his watch. "About two hours." He scratched his neck. "I was supposed to tell you that when you first woke up."

"Need to give Cam the keys and the code." Dean muttered. He rolled off the bed and padded into the other room to find his phone. "Tell them not to open any boxes." He said to his brother as he came back in.

"Daniel knows about that." Sam shrugged at Dean's expression. "He's my best friend. I don't hide stuff from him." At a different expression, Sam amended. "Much."

"Does he know you three are?" Ronon trailed off.

"Friends of the Halliwells?" Sam finished. "The broom closet door is opened far enough a double PhD of Daniel's caliber could figure it out."

"But no details like I heard." Ronon glanced at Evan.

"The garage, no. Dean's apparent abilities? Hell no." Evan replied.

"Those stay in this room." Dean added his two cents as he dialed Cam's cell number. "Or you're shark bait." He considered. "Although since you didn't scream for a psych eval on us, I'll make sure you're dead before Jaws takes his first bite."

"You forget where I grew up. The Lady of the Volcano gets her bottle of rum every time I go back."

"You've never gone back." Dean deadpanned.

"Its expensive rum. Haven't saved up enough money." Ronon's brief smile was full of teeth.

~~~~

Cameron, Daniel and Jennifer set out for San Jose at Oh My God it's early Thursday morning.

Cam had flown on his only visit and Jenn had never been further north than Monterey, so Daniel took the last leg of the drive.

They arrived with the plan that Jenn would get to know her new crew while Daniel and Cam packed up the Winchesters' apartment. They'd call Jenn home when they finished and unload her truck. A meal and a nap later, Jenn would have the place to herself, her helpers going back to Long Beach.

Since Murphy - you know, the one with The Law? - took the day off, the plan went fairly well.

Except when Cam asked why one of the bedrooms didn't look very lived in. Bullshitting on the fly, Daniel blamed it on Dean's schedule and habit of sleeping on the couch.

Cam, in turn, had to explain the presence of guns. The boys kept them locked in a small safe, but Cam didn't feel comfortable simply picking it up and hauling it outside. He was in the middle of making certain the weapons were secured to his satisfaction when Daniel came in.

The medium sized footlocker at the end of Sam's bed didn't get opened though. During one of Daniel's visits, many moons ago, Sam had unashamedly told him the trunk was for porn. That information was passed to Cam, who blinked, shook his head and stated that if anything in there got damaged, he would just fork over the money to replace it.

As they hauled the footlocker outside, Daniel grinned to himself. Cameron could joke about threesomes and bondage clubs at the drop of a hat, but he got all prudish when confronted with pictures of naked women. It was a never ending source of entertainment for all parties involved whenever a Penthouse turned up in 77's bunkrooms.

Daniel stopped grinning when - much, much sooner than they'd thought - they were done.  
They'd just finished strapping down the last thing in the entire apartment that the Winchesters owned.

Scattered hither and yon, it looked like Dean and Sam had a hell of a lot more stuff then they really did.

Like it would take longer than two hours to pack and load.

Like, even with Daniel's tricks and Cameron's military efficiency, it wouldn't fit into two cars with room to spare.

Right.

The Impala held the boys' photos, books and DVDs, plus the gun safe, Sam's footlocker, Dean's guitar, his gear for work and both his and Sam's tools. Secured to Baby's roof was a futon, the mattress being used as padding for the pieces of the frame.

The Mustang's trunk was full of clothes. In her backseat, wrapped in towels and bed linens, there were some little knickknacks, a few dishes, both boys' laptops, an impressively sized first aid kit, and the non-perishable foods that Jenn wouldn't eat.  
A lightweight recliner, so comfortable that Daniel would trade one of his little toenails for it, adorned Lady's blanket protected roof.

A microwave and a huge television that screamed 'curbside rescue' were being left behind. All the other furniture was part of the lease.

While Cam raided the refrigerator for lunch, Daniel called Jenn to come home.

~~~~

At the Engine 39 stationhouse, Michelle Patterson and Crystal Suarez greeted Jennifer when she wandered in to get the lay of the land.

Right off the bat, Jenn noticed that Dean's name wasn't on the board for requesting time to try and watch something on television. No M*A*S*H reruns or Mythbusters. No Food Network entries or football games.

Dean wasn't on the board to use the pool table either, but Jenn was aware of the fact that he didn't like the game, so that didn't surprise her at all.

That he wasn't listed to play table hockey did. At home, Dean and Lt. O'Neill had a standing game every Wednesday they worked. No one else even breathed on the table on Wednesdays with them in the house. Jenn wasn't sure she liked that someone here hadn't wasted any time taking Dean's slots away from him.

Things got stranger during the tour of the locker room, when Jenn learned Dean hadn't left so much as an ink pen laying around for her to box up.

Michelle told Jenn that Lincoln had added the San Jose Sharks sticker to the front of the empty locker so the probies would leave Dean some space in case he needed it. If Jenn wanted to take the sticker off, since the locker was hers now, she needed to mark the door with something else.

Despite preferring the Anaheim Mighty Ducks, Jenn left the Sharks' emblem alone.

Back in Long Beach, the door of Dean's locker was bedecked and bedazzled with witty bumper stickers. There were car magazines, comic books, classic rock CDs and medical journals left inside to be shared. The only thing to signal that Dean was gone for the winter were the missing photos. One of Sam in a graduation gown, leaning against the Impala and another of an old guy standing beside Sam's Lady.

As Jenn had been warned, Dean had nothing in the kitchen, preferring to use a non-personal F.D.S.J. issued coffee mug.

On the highest shelf in 77's Cabinet of Caffeine, Dean had two mugs. The probies might have to dust off the gold on white "Death before dishonor, but neither before coffee!" and the green on black "Attempting to give a damn. Process failed. Damn not given." for most of the year, but the mugs were ready when Dean returned to duty.

So was his bunk, made up with whatever sheets and blankets matched John's.

Dean's bed here was still wrapped in plastic, because, on the rare occasions he used it, he just threw his jacket over his chest and put his civilian duffel bag underneath his head as a pillow. The only reason Jenn wasn't getting it the way she'd gotten the locker was because the women had a smaller sleeping area all to themselves.

Jenn was beginning to feel numb by the time she accidentally called Dean "Shadow" and the nickname produced confused looks from everyone in the room instead of any form of recognition.

Here in San Jose, Dean went by Winchester or his title. Only F.A.O Burrows and Lt. Dawson called him by his first name on a regular basis. Michelle and Crystal had never been snapped at for taking the liberty once in a while, but Dean didn't encourage them either.

It went without saying that all attempts by 39 to give Dean a nom de plume had failed without a single shot being fired. It didn't matter what the name was, Dean refused to answer to it.

Now, Jenn knew why he would never in a billion years consent to "Gunny" but "Iceman" wasn't so bad. Hell, it was even fitting if you thought of Val Kilmer in Top Gun, with the spiky, blondish hair and the gum chewing and the spinning things in his fingers when he's bored.

She had a funny feeling she already knew the answer, but Jenn asked if Dean was supposed to go in on any company parties or off-hours field trips anyway. You know, like a football game or something?

Delicately, Crystal told her that if Dean wasn't on the clock, he was a ghost.

One of the guys from second shift, overhearing the comment, remarked. "You got a better chance of getting hit by lightning than seeing Winchester slumming. Dude's too good for us."

Jenn changed the subject and shut up after that, unable to reconcile the Dean she knew with the one Michelle and Crystal described.

She was grateful to leave a few minutes later.

~~~~

Captain Steven Caldwell from the Life Flight Air Rescue Division of the L.A. County Fire Department refuses to believe what happened was pilot error. Despite the lack of high winds, fog or other meteorological event, not for one minute…not for one second…did he think that John Sheppard screwed up.

Reporters, investigators, captains from other medevac companies who just wanted to gossip like old women...Anyone stupid enough to press the Fucked Up Theory got their asses kicked.

His best pair of steel toed boots were getting plenty of use between his office, the crash site and the hospital. Tuesday night, Steven had lost count of how many camera happy bastards wanted a shot of Sheppard's kids to go with the pictures of Tom Holland and Dexter Green's grieving families.

Yesterday and today it was how many vultures wanted someone to tell them Sheppard was a drunk or a junkie, all so they could wrap up their paperwork in five minutes instead of five months.

Exactly like the overpaid, lazy sumbitches in Maintenance who didn't want to do their goddamn jobs.

Unlike Steven, Sheppard didn't just know how to fly helicopters, he knew how to build and repair them. Steven's pulled the logbooks. Seen page after page of meticulously reported problems from someone who knew how to say "the chopper's shaking like a rat in a dog's mouth" in textbook perfect terms.

Steven spent a small fortune having ten separate copies made of those logbooks, not trusting the 'investigators' not to lose the fucking things to make their scapegoating easier.

He considered it money well spent the second time he'd spoken to someone from Homeland Security.

The first pair of men had 'bored and uncaring' written on their foreheads and their questions could've come right off a set of flashcards for any government agency in existence.

Despite the explanation that terrorists might be testing a way to take out Marine One - the President's helicopter - the agents only glanced at the logbooks, paying considerably more attention to John's fitness reports.

The second pair had also been men, but Steven had had to resist the urge to call them "Mulder and Scully", because some of the questions were just fucking weird. For instance, "has anyone stopped taking the Lord's name in vain recently?"

Steven hadn't been able to answer that one. He knew he'd been calling God and his son out several times a day since the crash, but he hadn't paid attention to anyone else.

They might've been wackjobs, but one point in Mulder and Scully's favor was the fact they really seemed to believe the crash was a terrorist thing, just not a test run. "Anyone acting out of character? Anyone showing unusual interest in John Sheppard or his family?"

That question had puzzled Steven until he remembered that Sheppard's father was some kind of big power company muck a muck. Who knew what the hell a saboteur would do to get access to a man like that?

If that was the case, the guy hadn't done his homework. From what Jack O'Neill had told Steven, you'd be better off using the older son against Patrick Sheppard.

The agent Steven dubbed Mulder kept asking about Sheppard's significant other, implying said S.O was male.

News to Steven's ears that Sheppard was dating anyone, let alone a guy. He recommended the agents talk to Sheppard's kids about any lovers.

Mulder didn't react to that, but Scully did.

Steven gave him the details on Dean and Sam, wondering why both agents looked sick by the end.


End file.
